The mystery of Hamlet. An attempt to solve an old problem

THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

AN ATTEMPT TO SOLVE AN OLD PROBLEM.

BY

EDWARD P. VINING.

" You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.'

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

1881.

Copyright, 1881, by E. P. VIXING.

TO

'HORACE HOWARD FURNESS,

BY WHOSE UNRIVALLED

VARIORUM EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE

ALL AMERICA IS HONORED,

AND TO WHOSE WORK THE WRITER IS INDEBTED FOR THE QUOTATIONS
PRESENTED IN SUPPORT OF HIS VIEWS,

THIS ESSAY

IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED.

854941

PREFACE.

THE views set forth in this little work not only suffer
from the lack of literary experience upon the part of him
by whom they are presented, but they are in themselves
so different from those which have usually been held in
relation to the character of Hamlet, that but little favor
can be hoped for them. That most will pass them by in
silence, and that some will crush them beneath the weight
of their scorn, may be expected. No theory could offer
a more inviting target for the shafts of ridicule ; none
could, at first sight, seem more absurd.

If true, why lias no one seen the truth before ? Who
can tell ! The art of Shakespeare was used to reveal the
character yet conceal its real nature. Many have seen
something of the truth, but stopped just short of discovery.
All have recognized the human character of Hamlet, and
yet all have failed to discern the true type of that human-
ity through the disguises by which it was clothed.

The new may be true. Even that which at first seems
an absurdity may, upon investigation, prove to be the sober
reality. It is something to see, or to believe that one sees. V
the path that Shakespeare followed, — to observe how dif-
ficulties were met, — how, with the growth of his power,
he learned to substitute Hamlet's inherent personality as
the origin of the prolongation of the movement of the
drama, for the extraneous events which, in its earlier form,
were the causes of the delay. It is something to watch ,

G PREFACE.

his dalliance with an idea at first forced upon him, and
then fondled with delight ; to see with what skill he re-
moves that which is incompatible with this cherished
conceit ; to note the delicate touches by which he allows
glimpses of the fancy to be shown, and yet the ingenuity
with which it is kept hidden.

If this patient laborer, recasting his work with loving,
tender care, and moulding into it his most precious imagi-
nation, be not Shakespeare, but only the creation of a
dream, then to him to whom the vision can come the
dream has all the reality and pleasure of truth.

Assuming the theory to be absolute truth, there are
many to whom it would be but foolishness. It is not to
be supposed that those, for instance, who, in reading the
tragedy, can blindly stumble over a series of careful dis-
closures of the length of time covered by its action, and
find no clue thereto, can see a truth which Shakespeare
has used all his art to conceal.

There are many who would like to like these immortal
dramas and who are ignorant of their failure ; many who
criticise their perfections with as little appreciation as
Bottom had for fairies' fare ; many to whom oats and hay
are sweeter than the ambrosia of the gods.

Therefore, reader, smile with disdain or laugh in ridi-
cule if to you it seem good. The fault may be in the
writer, or it may be in you. Who shall decide ? If for
you the following pages contain no truth, open no new in-
sight into the mind of the world's great poet, then they
are not for you. They are for those only, be they many
or few, to whom they contain a revelation.

EDWARD P. VINING.

OMAHA, NEBRASKA, July 3, 1881.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

THE EXISTENCE OF A MYSTERY.

PAGE

Introduction — " Hamlet" the Chief of Shakespeare's Dramas — The
Inconsistencies of its Hero — The Depth of Humanity revealed
in his Character — The Existence of a Mystery — Recognition of
the Mystery by Hudson, Dowden, Tyler, SchJegel, Klein, Her-
mann Freiherr von Friesen, and Furness — Goethe's Solution —
His Dissatisfaction with it — Query as to its Nature . . .11

CHAPTER II.

THE HISTORY OF THE STORY.

Examination of the History of the Tragedy — The Second Quarto
— Discovery of the First Quarto — Differences — The Custom of
revising Older Works — The Pre-existence of the Story of "Ham-
let"— Saxo Grammaticus — Francis de Belleforest — Existence of
a Drama named "Hamlet" in 1589 — The Play presented in 1594
—References to it in 1596, 1598, and 1602— The Ghost intro-
duced in this Drama, but not in the Earlier Story — Reasons for
believing Shakespeare to be the Author of the Play of 1589
— His Early Poverty — Birth of Twin Children named Hamnet
and Judith — Removal to London in 1586 — His Purchase of
Shares in the Blackfriars Theatre in 1589 — Means could have
been obtained only by the Production of a Successful Play —
" Hamlet" produced at just this Time — Quotation from Nash —
Probability that he intended to describe the Youthful Shake-
speare — Thomas Green — Shakespeare's Acquaintance with
Legal Phraseology . 17

CHAPTER III.

DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY.

Examination of the Theory that the First Quarto :s merely a
Mangled Piratical Version of the Play as given in the Second
Quarto — Changes in the Lines of the Player King — Shake-

7

8 CONTENTS.

PACK

speare's Intuitive Knowledge — Reasons for believing the Play
to have been recast Several Times — The Appeal for Revenge —
The Ghost inspired by a Yearning for Sympathy and by Love
for the Queen — "Fratricide Punished" — The Prologue — Its
Resemblance to the Introduction to the Second Part of " King
Henry Fourth" — Change in the Names of the Characters and in
their Number — Change in Hamlet's Stratagem — The Division
of the Drama into Acts — Its Difficulty — Changes and Transpo-
sitions of Scenes — Reasons for delaying Action — Absence of
Hamlet's Distinguishing Peculiarities — Date of the German
Drama — The Expedition to Portugal — The Allusion to Roscius 25

CHAPTER IV.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER.
The Revisions of the Drama — Reason for Meres's Failure to men-
tion it — The Practice of rewriting Old Plays — The Improve-
ment the Sufficient Excuse for the Appropriation — The Depth
of Meaning in the Incidental Allusions in " Hamlet" — This
Perfect Art the Result of Long-Continued Efforts — The Ancient
Story of the Danish Prince — Differences between It and the
Drama — The Incidents too few for a Five-Act Play — Hence the
Introduction of the Ghost and of Additional Characters — A New
Difficulty — The Necessity of postponing Hamlet's Revenge
until the End of the Play — Hence the Necessity of Vacillation
in his Actions — Hence a Gradual Change in Shakespeare's Con-
ception of the Character — The Evolution beyond Shakespeare's
Power to control . 37

CHAPTEE Y.

THE TYPE OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER.

Hamlet admired in spite of his Apparent Defects — Two Types of
Human Perfection — The Failure to recogni/e Hamlet's True
Type — Lady Macbeth his Counterpart — Hamlet, Macbeth, and
Lear a Trilogy — Stratagem used when Strength fails — Hamlet's
Love of Indirect Means — Its Recognition by Dr. Maudsley and
Schlegel — Hamlet's Fondness for Words rather than Deeds —
Quotations from Rohrbach, Hazlitt, and Bacon— Hamlet's Fear
of Death — His Soliloquy — Recognition of his State of Mind by
Mr. Jones Very — This Timidity Unnatural in a Prince — Ham-

CONTENTS. 9

PAGE

let's Weariness of the Burdens of Life — The Class of Minds
from which such Feelings would be expected . . . .46

CHAPTER VI.

HAMLET'S NATURE ESSENTIALLY FEMININE.
Hamlet's Impulsiveness — His Love for Mockery — His Disgust
with Revelry — His Pretty Oaths — His Fear of breaking into
Tears — His Admiration for Manly Virtues and Detestation of
Feminine Weaknesses — His Eulogy of Man — His Panegyrics of
his Father — His Treatment of his Mother and Ophelia — Com-
parison with the Interviews between Viola and Olivia and be-
tween Rosalind and Phebe — May not Shakespeare have at last .
entertained the Thought that Hamlet might be a Woman ? —
This was not his Original Conception of the Character — Shake-
speare may never have fully yielded to the Fancy, but certainly
dallied with it — The Rewording of the Drama with this Idea in
view — Shakespeare's Fondness for allowing his Heroines to
masquerade in Male Attire — King Lear — In a Comedy this
Masquerade is but Temporary, but in a Tragedy must be car-
ried out to the End ......... 54

CHAPTER VII.

HAMLET?S LOVE FOR HORATIO AND JEALOUSY OF OPHELIA-
Hamlet and Horatio constantly together — Hamlet confides in him
alone — The Letter to Horatio — The Grave-yard Scene — Dis-
prized Love — His Eulogy of Horatio — The Death Scene — Ho-
ratio unscourged by Hamlet's Tongue — Contrast between his
Treatment of Horatio and Ophelia — The Letter to Ophelia —
The Scene at the Grave — His Rebuke by the Actor j by For-
tinbras : by Laertes — His Feeling of Humiliation in the Pres-
ence of Horatio — Jealousy of Ophelia — Horatio's Intimacy
with her — The Play Scene — His Caution to her to be less free
of her Presence — His Warning to Polonius . . . .62

CHAPTER VIII.

ADDITIONAL FEMININE TRAITS.

Hamlet's Raillery at Marriage — His Censure of his Mother — His
Bitterness is exhibited rather towards her than towards the

10 CONTENTS.

PAGE

King — Hunter's Comment — No Mistake in Shakespeare — Ham-
let's Attempts to deceive Himself — His Quickness of Apprecia-
tion of Difference of Sex — His Bodily Characteristics — Small,
Delicate, yet Plump — His Daintiness — His Sensitiveness to the
Weather and to Odors — Hamlet is Hysterical — Irving's Notice
of this Fact — Hamlet faints—Julia and Rosalind — Hamlet's
Physical Strength — Overcome by Laertes — His Skill in Fencing 72

CHAPTEK IX.

HAMLET'S AGE AND BIRTH — THE TERMS USED IN ADDRESS-
ING HIM.

Hamlet's Youthful Beauty — The General Admiration for Him —
Apparent Incompatibility between his Age and Appearance —
Explanation— The Date of his Birth— The Mortal Combat be-
tween King Hamlet and Fortinbras — Presumption that the
King was Wounded — Anxiety for a Son — No Daughter could
succeed to the Throne — Hamlet the only Child — Possibility of
an Attempt to pass off a Daughter for a Son — No Retreat — The
Ghost never calls Hamlet " Son" — The Word frequently used
in "Fratricide Punished" — The Usurper calls him Son — Ham-
let shrinks from the Title— He turns the Tables— Use of the
Term " Son" by Hamlet and the Queen — Other Objections to the
Theory — Hamlet's Beardless Face 80

CHAPTEE X.

HAMLET'S HINTS or FEMININITY — COMPARISON BETWEEN

DIFFERENT EDITIONS.

Hints — Some Vicious Mole of Nature — More Things in Heaven
and Earth — Actions that a Man might play — The Signature
of his Letter to Ophelia — A Gaingiving that would perhaps
trouble a Woman — His Last Words — "The Rest is Silence" —
Comparison between First and Second Quartos — Comparison of
these with " Fratricide Punished" — Passages not found in the
Earlier Form of the Play— Change of the Length of Wedded
Life of the Player King and Queen — Passages in the First
Quarto stricken out of the Second — The Necessity of Hamlet's
Death — Conclusion 89

THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

CHAPTER I.

THE EXISTENCE OF A MYSTERY.

As among the myriads who. since the days of Homer,
have attempted to crystallize in human words the ever-
varying tales of human life and love, one stands out pre-
eminent and incomparable, so among his works there rises
one, the undisputed crown of all, with an irresistible fasci-
nation, attracting even those to whom the language in
which it was written is an unknown tongue.

"With an incredible plot, and a hero who, weak and
vacillating, continually does those things which he ought
not to do and leaves undone those things which he ought
to have done, there is yet revealed a depth of human feel-
ing, and a knowledge of the inmost springs that move the
puppets whom we call mankind, before which humanity
bows.

With other writers, their characters are frequently but
embodied qualities, moved by one emotion. The heroine
is the embodiment of love, and lives but to love, alone.
The good are supernaturally good, with scarcely one con-

11

12 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

(/Fasting vice, and tlie villains are creatures of crime whom
no remorse can reach. One character is the embodiment
of avarice ; another, of ambition ; a third, of revenge ; and
each stalks through his mimic life inspired by but a single
motive. In Shakespeare's works alone do we see that
tangled web of which human lives are composed : weak-

• -lies* and strpiy^tlj -dmlbined ; light and shade ; a thousand

conflicting' ahofc:i?\' eb 'la' inextricable confusion, driving their

', ; tkftkli! to <:W(>;Fro;; jind ainong them all we see the man. a

' ' creature of as 'niaiked individuality, as complete in his hu-

/ inanity, as the fellow-beings among whom we move. Other
authors reveal the man by his actions, but Shakespeare

v shows the man in spite of his actions ; and in the character
of Hamlet we have a bundle of contradictions, as yet inex-
plicable and mysterious. No man has fathomed the depths
which could produce a Hamlet. Weak and vacillating as
he is, there is yet some quality which forbids that any
should despise or condemn him. Macbeth, with far less
of irresolution, is contemptuously dismissed as weak, yet
Hamlet, constantly driven by the circumstances that sur-
rounded him, and never able to conquer them even to the
moment when they bring about his revenge and simulta-
neous death, commands a universal sympathy and admira-
tion. Why should Hamlet have faltered ? — why feigned
madness? — why needlessly tortured the young girl who
loved him, and driven her from him with coarse and cruel
words ? Why, in any and all his actions, should they have

been as they were? Who knows?

One thing only is sure, that the character of Hamlet re-
veals a depth of humanity which all earnest students infal-

libly recognize.

Like a distant landscape seen through ;

THE EXISTENCE OF A MYSTERY. 13

cloud of smoky, heated air, each particular point when
steadily looked at seems to waver and flicker and be un-
certain, and yet through this changing uncertainty as to
details can be seen the outlines of a noble view.

What is it that so distinguishes Hamlet from all other
creations of the poet? That some mystery lurks in the
subtle fascination is undeniable. Of the hundreds who
have discussed the subject, scarcely one has failed to note
it. The following quotations will show how universal is
this feeling :

" Hamlet himself has caused more of perplexity and
discussion than any other character in the whole range of
art. The charm of his mind and person amounts to an
almost universal fascination ; and he has been well de-
scribed as a t concentration of all the interests that belong
to humanity.' I have learned by experience that one
seems to understand him better after a little study than
after a great deal ; and that the less one sees into him the
more apt one is to think he sees through him ; in which
respect he is indeed like nature herself. One man con-
siders Hamlet great, but wicked ; another good, but weak ;
a third, that he lacks courage, and dare not act; a fourth,
that he has too much intellect for his will, and so reflects
away the time of action ; some conclude his madness half
genuine ; others, that it is wholly feigned. Doubtless
there are facts in the delineation which, considered by
themselves, would sustain any one of these views ; but
none of them seem reconcilable with all the facts taken
together. Yet, notwithstanding this diversity of opinions,
all agree in thinking of Hamlet as an actual person. It is
easy to invest with plausibility almost any theory respect-

14 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

ing him, but very hard to make any theory comprehend the
whole subject; and while all are impressed with the truth
of the character, no one is satisfied with another's explana-
tion of it. The question is, why such unanimity as to his
being a man, and at the same time such diversity as to
what sort of man he is? . . . After all, it must be con-
fessed that there is a mystery about Hamlet which baffles
the utmost eiforts of criticism." — Hudson.

" The mystery, the baffling, vital obscurity of the play,
and in particular of the character of its chief person, make
it evident that Shakespeare had left far behind him that
early stage of development when an artist obtrudes his
intentions, or, distrusting his own ability to keep sight of
one uniform design, deliberately and with effort holds that
design persistently before him. . . . Hamlet might have
been so easily manufactured into an enigma, or a puzzle ;
and then the puzzle, if sufficient pains were bestowed,
could be completely taken to pieces and explained. But
Shakespeare created it a mystery, and therefore it is for-
ever suggestive ; forever suggestive, and never wholly
explicable." — Prof. Doicden.

ic Polonius, after a remarkable display of Hamlet's ' antic
disposition,' says : ' though this be madness, yet there
is method in't.' Is it possible for us to discern this
< method' ? Can we discover ^any deeper meaning lying be-
neath what is outwardly so ' odd' and ' strange' ?" — Tlw$.
Tyler.

" This enigmatical work resembles those irrational equa-
tions, in which a fraction of unknown magnitude always
remains, that will in no manner admit of solution." — A.
W. SchlegeL

THE EXISTENCE OF A MYSTERY. 15

"There is no drama, as all the world knows, upon which
so much has been written as Shakespeare's Hamlet. ... A
critical tower of Babel of amazing height and breadth has
been reared, and for the same purpose as in the Scripture :
to scale celestial heights, and, as people see, with the same
result. The celestial heights remain unsealed." — Klein.

if How was it possible that a finely-cultured man, the
same man whose incomparable advantages we have just-
been considering, an honored prince, the offspring of an
heroic king, a member of the regal court, could take upon
himself the shame of a disordered brain ? Here there
certainly lies before us a riddle which we strive in vain
fully to solve, the secret of a soul into whose abyss only
the greatest of poets was able to look." — Hermann
Freilierr von Friesen.

" In the endeavor to solve the mystery of Hamlet, the
human mind, not only in its clear radiance but in the sad
twilight of its eclipse, has been subjected to the most search-
ing analysis. This ideal character,, Hamlet, has been as-
sumed to be very nature, and if we fail to reach a solution
of the problem which it presents, the error lies in us and
in our analysis ; not in SHAKESPEARE." — Furness.

The solution which Groethe proposed for this univer-
sally admitted mystery has been the one usually accepted :

u To me it is clear that Shakespeare sought to depict a
great deed laid upon a soul unequal to the performance of
it. In this view I find the piece composed throughout.
Here is an oak-tree planted in a costly vase which should
have received into its bosom only lovely flowers. The
roots spread out, the vase is shivered to pieces. A beau-
tiful, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the

16 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

strength of nerve which makes the hero, sinks beneath a
burden which it can neither bear nor throw off; every
duty is holy to him, — this too hard. The impossible is
required of him, — not the impossible in itself, but the im-
possible to him."

Yet we find it stated that in his later years Goethe did
not rest satisfied with his explanation. " After all is said,"
he remarked in relation to Hamlet, " that weighs upon
one's soul as a gloomy problem."

The mystery which enshrouds the character may be
suggested in a query.

Why is it that with so much that seems unaccountable
and strange in the doings of Hamlet, so much that is at
variance with all that would naturally be expected from a
man, humanity still recognizes in him a fellow-being, in-
tensely human in all his thoughts and ways ?

That Hamlet was placed in extraordinary circumstances,
surroundings so far from those with which we are ac-
quainted that even the visit of a spirit from the grave
must be accepted as an actuality, may account for many
strange effects, but not for all the vacillation and weak-
ness that are exhibited by him.

Taking for granted the existence of such a mystery,
the question remains as to whether a careful examination
of the drama can enable us to solve it.

CHAPTER IT.

THE HISTORY OF THE STORY.

THE play as we now have it is substantially the same as it
appears in what is known as the u Second Quarto," which
was printed in the year 1G04 with the following title-page:/

THE
TRAGICALL HISTORIE OF

HAMLET

PRINCE OF DENMARKE
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

NEWLY IMPRINTED AND ENLARGED TO ALMOST AS MUCH

AGAINE AS IT WAS, ACCORDING TO THE TRUE AND PERFECT

COPPIE.

AT LONDON,
PRINTED' BY I. R. FOR N. L., AND ARE TO BE SOLD AT HIS

SHOPPE VNDER SAINT DUNSTONS CHURCH IN
FLEETSTREET. 1604.

Until 1823 this was the oldest edition known ; but in
that year Sir Henry Bunbury found in a closet at Barton,
in a small quarto, bound up with a number of other plays,
2 17

18 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

an edition of" Hamlet" bearing the date 1603, which differs
widely from that of 1604, not only in words and phrases,
but even in the names of some of the characters and in the
order of some of the scenes, and is but little more than
half as long as the later edition. It not only omits much
that is found in our present drama, but contains some
phrases, and one full scene, omitted in the later edition.

There can be little doubt that these differences repre-
sent a real difference in the dramas; that is to say, our
" Hamlet" of to-day differs in many respects from " Hamlet"
as originally written by Shakespeare. That he re- wrote and
revised the play at least once is almost certain ; that he
may have done so several times seems probable.

There is a period in the development of nations when
literary effort is turned toward the presentation of old
tales in a new form, rather than toward the creation of
new themes. The old stories are repeated and re-repeated
in different forms, and the popular taste is more surely
pleased by a variation of a well-known legend than by a
new creation. The history of Sanscrit literature is a his-
tory of almost infinite .variations of a few ancient myths ;
and even Homer did not disdain to arrange and reword
and combine the tales which had been sung by generations
of bards before him. In Shakespeare's time dramatic lit-
erature was in this stage of development. We know of
many of Shakespeare's plays that they are but repetitions
of a twice-told tale : earlier tales and dramas were re-writ-
ten ; most of the characters remained the same ; much of
the old plot was retained ; but the additions and changes
made by Shakespeare were enough to. constitute the differ-
ence between death and life.

THE HISTORY OF THE STORY. 19

Others had carved statues with a skilful hand, resem-
bling life, but cold and dead. Shakespeare touched them
with his magic hand, and they sprang into life, more than
mortal. Creatures of flesh and blood have struggled
through their lives and gone down to forgetful ness, their
children and their children's children after them have
lived and loved and striven and hoped and despaired.
Some have strutted with the pride of fancied success, and
some have bowed their heads in misery and despair and
folded their arms above broken hearts : but one event hath
happened to them all : as the one died, so died the other,
and there is no remembrance of them upon the earth.
Their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished,
neither have they any more a portion forever in anything
that is done under the sun ; but the creations of our im-
mortal poet bloom with an eternal .youth, and live on un-
changeable amidst a changing world.

So, in the case of the drama of which Hamlet is the
centre, Shakespeare took the puppets of a former creation,
and breathed into them the breath of life, and they became
living souls.

Hamlet and his unhappy father, the king who murdered
his brother, and the queen who married the murderer, had
had an existence for many centuries. In the twelfth cen-
tury, Saxo Grammaticus, a celebrated Danish historian, in-
cluded in his " Danish History" the earliest form of the
history of Hamlet that has reached us, repeating this, with
many other stories of early days, from the information that
he had acquired from old tales, songs, and traditions. About
1571, Francis de Belleforest published in a French collec-
tion of " Tragical Histories," among many other stories,

20 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

some original and some borrowed, the history of Hamlet,
having derived the plot of his story from Saxo Grammati-
cus or from some intermediate writer ; and there is little
doubt that Belleforest's story, either directly or through
some translation or adaptation, suggested to Shakespeare
the foundation of his immortal masterpiece.

Although we have no sure record of the existence of
our Shakespearian Hamlet before 1603. there is undoubted
evidence that a drama of that name was played as early as
1589. The first allusion to it that is found was made by
Nash, who, referring to the dramatists of his time, wrote, —

i( It is a common practice now a daies amongst a sort of
shifting companions, that runne through every arte and
thrive by none to leave the trade of Noverint whereto
they were borne, and busie themselves with the indevours
of art, that could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse if
they should have neede ; yet English Seneca read by can-
dle-light yeeldes nianie good sentences, as Bloidd is a beg-
ger^ and so foorth : and if you intreate him faire in a
frostie morning, he will aifoord you whole Hamlets — I
should say Handfulls of tragical speaches."

From an account-book of Philip Henslowe, a theatrical
proprietor or lessee, it appears that " Hamlet" was played
June 9, 1594, and that it was not then new.

In 1596 a certain Dr. Lodge published a pamphlet, in
which the doctor, in discussing " Hate- Virtue" or " Sorrow
for another man's good Success," says that it is "a foule
lubber, and looks as pale as the visard of ye ghost, which
cried so miserally at ye Cheater, like an oisterwife, ' Ham-
let reuenge.' :}

A note written by Dr. Gabriel Harvey in an edition of

THE HISTORY OF THE STORY. 21

Chaucer which he owned, which note there is reason to
believe was written in 1598, is as follows : " The younger
sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,
but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Dcn-
marJce have it in them to please the wiser sort."

In Dekker's " Satiro-mastix" of 1G02 the following
phrase occurs : " My name's Hamlet reuenge : thou hast
been at Parris garden, hast not?"

These I facts show that during the period between 1589
and 1603 there existed a play having the story of Hamlet
as its foundation, and in which there appeared a ghost ap-
pealing for revenge. In the earlier histories of Hamlet
the father of the prince was openly put to death by his
brother. It is only in the later drama, of which we have
no account until the year in which we find a record that
Shakespeare had become a sharer in the Blackfriars The-
atre, that the murder becomes a secret crime, undiscover-
able except by the aid of the unquiet spirit of the victim.
The change was bold, and lies at the foundation of the
drama. It was a change characteristic of the genius of
Shakespeare, and there seems reason for believing that it
was he, and he alone, who planned it.

Four years before, in 1585, a few months before he was
twenty-one years of age, twin children were born in his
country home, to whom he gave the names of Hamnet and
Judith. The boy, Shakespeare's first son, was named after
the hero of the old tale, for "Hamnet" is but a verbal
variation of " Hamlet."

How long before may the young husband, in admiration
of the filial affection and steadfast resolution of the prince
who took upon himself the degradation of pretended idiocy

22 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

(for this and not raving insanity was the disguise assumed
by the hero of the ancient story) and steadily awaited the
time when it should become possible for him to avenge
the open murder of his father and the calumny heaped
upon him by his murderer, have determined that his first-
born son should bear the name ? Even for his daughter
there was found a name having a double connection with
the story of the Danish prince; for Judith, too, took life
and honor in her hand, in order by a desperate effort of
weakness against enthroned strength to accomplish a
mighty and sanctified purpose ; and in her name of Judith
there may also exist a play upon the name of Jutie-land.

When his twins were about a year old, the youthful
father, with but scanty means, removed to London to bet-
ter his fortune. Here we have no record of him until
three years later, when his name appears as a sharer in the
Blackfriars Theatre.

How did this penniless boy attain to such prosperity
within three years?

Not by his ability as an actor, for our record of his im-
personations names only two parts in which he ever ap-
peared (and one of these, by the way, was that of the
ghost in " Hamlet").

It seems impossible that this unknown, impoverished
country youth should have been able to leap at a bound
into the partial proprietorship of the theatre with which
his name was connected, in any other way than by the au-
thorship of some one or more plays of great success, —
plays winning for their author both money and renown.

When Shakespeare first tried his powers as a dramatist,
what story would more naturally occur to the father,

THE HISTORY OF THE STORY. 23

struggling for maintenance for his son, as the ground- work

Oo o r • <3

for his drama, than the story which in his younger days
had so impressed him as to induce him to bestow upon his
son the name of its hero ? If Hamlet were his first play,
how natural would it be that, in his anxiety that it should
be seen at its best, he himself should take the role of the
unquiet spirit whose introduction forms the foundation for
all the important variations from the formerly well known
story, and upon the success of whose impression upon the
audience depended the success of his tragedy !

This much appears certain, — that within three years
after Shakespeare's arrival in London a play bearing the
name of " Hamlet" had been recently produced, and had
been successful, that in this play a ghost appeared crying,
" Hamlet, revenge" (and this phrase seems to have so fixed
itself upon the public attention that in the only two refer-
ences that we have to this early play, in which any portion
of it appears, these words, and these alone, are quoted in
both cases), and that the author had but recently left "the
trade of Noverint" to " busie" himself with the u indeauors
of art." Some youthful aspirant, previously unknown to
fame, had therefore bounded into a sudden renown, by the
authorship of the play.

At just this time, Shakespeare emerges from obscurity,
as, in some way, the possessor of sufficient money or credit
to purchase an interest in the theatre, and soon afterwards
we find frequent notices of him, with laudations of his
powers as a dramatist.

In Stratford there lived a certain Thomas Green, who
was an attorney, and was so related to the Shakespeare
family that not only does his son call our immortal poet

24 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

his " cozen Shakespeare," but the burial of the father is
recorded in the parish register as that of " Thomas Green,
• alias Shakespeare." In the lack of facts as to Shake-
speare's early life, is not the assumption that he may have
studied for a time in the office of this relative a reasonable
one, together with its natural consequence, that when he
first went to London it would be as a " Noverint" or law-
yer's clerk that he would first endeavor to make his way ?
His works are full of legal allusions, and in this very play
of Hamlet his discourse with Horatio in the church-yard
shows a wonderful knowledge of legal phrases, and the
reasoning of the first grave-digger with his companion is
but a travesty of a legal decision given many years before,
of which no one outside of an attorney's office would
have been likely to know, except as it might have been
popularly discussed immediately after it was given, and so
have come to the ears of even a grave-digger, but to be
soon forgotten. There is, therefore, abundant reason for
thinking that the term "Noverint" may have been applied
to Shakespeare, and Nash's reference to the "shifting
companions that run through every arte" is very similar to
the phrase u an absolute Johannes factotum" applied to the
poet by Robert Green in an attack made a few years later.

Who was the formerly unknown lawyer's clerk who in or
just prior to the year 1589 wrote the drama of " Hamlet" ?

How did Shakespeare, in 1589, within three years after
coming to London unknown and in poverty, attain such
prosperity as to enable him to purchase a share in the
theatre ?

Does not one query answer the other, and is it possible
to answer either without reference to the other ?

CHAPTER III.

DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY.

ASSUMING that the " Hamlet" of 1589 was the work
of Shakespeare, the question remains whether it was sub- '
stantially the same drama that we now have. We have
already spoken of the differences between the edition of
the play which was published in 1603 and that of 1604.
These differences seem altogether too radical to be ex-
plained by the theory that the earlier publication was a
piratical version, taken down in short-hand or partly written
out from memory from a theatrical representation of the
tragedy in its present form. There is strong reason for
believing the edition of 1603 to have been printed without
authority, from an imperfect copy, and to have been
maimed and distorted in many ways ; yet no errors of a
hasty copyist, or of an imperfect memory, can account for
many of the differences between the two editions. No
mere carelessness could turn the names of Polonius and
Reynaldo into Corambis and Montano ; no dull ear of an
unappreciative listener could turn the stilted lines of the
mimic king, in the play-scene as we now have it, into the"
liquid music of the early quarto.

When Shakespeare first wrote this play within a play,
he filled it with beauty and with Shakespearian character-
istics. Witness the follqwing lines :

25

26 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

il Full fortie yeares are past, their date is gone,
Since happy time ioyn'd both our hearts as one :
And now the blood that fill'd my youthfull veines
Kunnes weakely in their pipes, and all the straines
Of musicke, which whilome pleasde mine eare,
Is now a burthen that Age cannot beare :
And therefore sweete Nature must pay his due,
To heauen must I, and leaue the earth with you."

These lines are probably- somewhat corrupted, but no
meaner hand than Shakespeare's wrote the verses from
which they were copied.

Note the beauty of the third, fourth, and fifth lines,
and notice, too, how our " absolute Johannes Factotum,"
to whom all human knowledge seems to be but a matter of
instinct, in them prophesies the truth as to the circulation
of the blood in the veins and " pipes," a truth which Har-
vey probably did not even suspect until at least thirteen
years later, and did not publicly declare and demonstrate
until a quarter of a century after the publication of this
quarto.

When re-writing the tragedy, our poet felt the necessity
of more distinctly separating this mimic play from the
body of the drama, and, by intensifying the feeling that it
was a play, of so intensifying the feeling that the sur-
roundings were those of real life. So he carefully and un-
sparingly pruned out the beauty of the lines and for them
substituted the following jog-trot :

"Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round
Neptune's salt wash and Tell us' orbed ground,
And thirty dozen moons with borrow'd sheen
About the world have times twelve thirties been,

DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY. 27

Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands
Unite commutual in most sacred hands.

-* •& -X- * * •&

Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too ;
My operant powers their functions leave to do ;
And thou shalt live in this fair world hehind,
Honor 7d, beloved."

Is it possible that a.ny " actor who put down from
memory a sketch of the original play as it was acted, and
who wrote very illegibly," or any " bad poet, most prob-
ably a bookseller's hack," who, " without any personal in-
tercourse with the writer of these notes, availed himself
of them to make up his early copy of ' Hamlet,' " and who,
according to the theory that between them they, with
scarcely any appreciation for the poetry or real beauties
of the play, mangled our drama of to-day into the form
of the first edition, could blindly mangle

u My operant powers their functions leave to do"
into

" And now the blood that fill'd my youthfull veines
Kunnes weakely in their pipes, and all the straines
Of musicke, which whilome pleasde mine eare,
Is now a burthen that Age cannot beare." ?

If further proof is needed that the chief differences
between the first and second quartos are owing to the re-
writing and careful elaboration of the drama by the hand
of him who originally sketched it out in rough, many
strong arguments favoring that view may be found in the
" Introductory Note to Hamlet" in Knight's edition of

28 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

Shakespeare, and a careful examination and comparison
of the two forms of the drama, line by line, will furnish
so many proofs of the truth of this view that their com-
bined weight seems irresistible.

We have, then, evidences that Shakespeare's c: Hamlet"
was rewritten at least once. Was it rewritten or substan-
tially changed more than once ? There is some reason to
believe that it was recast several times, and that we have
evidences of its existence in at least four different forms.

Observe that the earlier references to the play all quote
the phrase " Hamlet, revenge." The inference is strong
that these were the words with which the ghost first ap-
pealed to Hamlet, and that this appeal was repeated again
and again, until to the popular ear it represented the
burden of its mission. Could it have so done had it been a
fact that in the play as originally presented the phrase did
not occur at all (as in the case of our present version), and
if even the word " revenge" occurred but twice in one of
the appearances of the spirit to Hamlet and not at all in
the other ? May it not have been that, when thj^ history
was first written, the mission of the ghost was Delusively
to invite to vengeance and the burden of its appeal was
nothing but " Hamlet, revenge," and that with the
riper experience of Shakespeare's later years and his
deeper insight into human nature he infused more of a
mixture of human feelings into the yearnings of the u per-
turbed spirit," so as more surely to strike responsive chords
in human hearts ?

In our present masterpiece it is not a desire for revenge
that is the main cause of the perturbation of the troubled
soul. The fires in which he was confined to fast had purged

DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY. 29

and burned away not only his foul crimes but many unsanc-
tified passions, and the yearning for revenge, merely as
revenge, is but weak. It is partly a longing for the sym-
pathy of his only child to aid him in the sufferings through
which he is passing — sufferings greater than may be re-
vealed to ears of flesh and blood — that causes him thus to
revisit the glimpses of the moon ; but far more than this,
it is a yearning solicitude for his wife, for whom his " love
was of that dignity that it went hand in hand even with
the vow he made to her in marriage," to whom he was so
loving " that he might not beteem the winds of heaven
visit her face too roughly." That she should live in sin,
and allow " the royal bed -of Denmark to be a couch for
luxury and damned incest," was the burden too great
for his suffering soul, — a burden so great that even the
sepulchre must ope its c: ponderous and marble jaws" to
cast him up again, that in some way he might put an
end to this pollution of his loved one.

It is this for which he appeals to Hamlet, " If thou
hast nature in thee, bear it not." And yet with what
tenderness does he plead for the erring, guilty queen ! —

11 Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught ; leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her."

And in his second visit to Hamlet his words are but few
other than are inspired by his tender care for her :

" But, look, amazement on thy mother sits :
O step between her and her fighting soul, —

30 THE MYSTERY .OF HAMLET.

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works, —
Speak to her, Hamlet."

This is prefaced only by the words,—

11 Do not forget : this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose ;"

in which there surely is but little of the spirit of the appeal
which first so fixed itself upon the public ear : " Hamlet,
revenge."

There is therefore at least some little reason for think-
ing that neither the first nor the second quarto gives the
drama in its first state. A clue to still another stage of
" Hamlet" is found in a German play entitled "Der Be-
strafte Brudermord, oder : Prinz Hamlet aus Daennemark"
(Fratricide Punished ; or, Prince Hamlet of Denmark),
which there is strong reason for believing to be a free
adaptation of Shakespeare's " Hamlet" in some one of its
early forms. A translation of this German play is given
in Furness's Variorum Shakespeare, from which a colla-
tion of the drama as there given, with the first and second
quartos and first folio, shows the following striking points
of difference, among others.

The curtain rises upon a prologue spoken by NIGHT, in a
car covered by stars, who calls up her children, the three
Furies, Alecto, Thisiphone, and Maegera, and reveals to
them the story of the king who, inspired by love for the
wife of his brother, murdered him, that he might possess
both her and the kingdom. NIGHT calls upon the Furies
to aid her in sowing the seeds of disunion, mingling
poison with their marriage, putting jealousy in their

DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORF. 31

hearts, and kindling a fire of revenge of which the sparks
shall fly over the whole realm.

This prelude is poetical, and, with the exception of a
few rhyming closing couplets, embodies all the poetry
that is preserved in this adaptation. This mythological
prologue is in the vein of the earlier English dramatists,
and reminds us of the introduction to the second part of
" King Henry the Fourth," in which Rumour, " painted
full of tongues," prepares the way for the opening of the
play. It appears to be distinctly Shakspearian, and to be
the translation of a prologue with which the earlier repre-
sentations of " Hamlet" were prefaced, but which was
afterward dropped by the poet when revising and re-
writing the drama.

There are many c^jfenccs that this German drama was
adapted neither fromHB first nor the second quarto nor
the present form of ^^Bnglish play, but from some other
form of the story, o^^Riing some passages that appear in
only one of the ^^Jeditions, and probably some points
that were dropp^Bn them all, and also omitting many
things that are common to them all, but which were added
to the play by Shakespeare after their German translation
had been made.

Polonius appears as Corambus, being, except in one let-
ter, the same name as that given him in the first quarto.
The king's name is Erico, the queen's Sigrie. Osric and
the grave-diggers do not appear, but, in their place, the
comic element is supplied by Phantasmo, the court fool,
and Jens, a peasant, and in the scene in which the latter
begs the intercession of Phantasmo and his protection at
the court we seem to have a foreshadowing of the inter-

32 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

view between Autolycus and the shepherd in the " Win-
ter's Tale/' Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear only as
two nameless attendants, or banditti, who, starting for Eng-
land in charge of Hamlet, land with him upon an island
and there attempt to carry out the king's orders for his
death, by shooting him. Hamlet begs as a favor that he
may kneel between them in prayer, and may give the
signal for his death by stretching out his arms, when he
asks them to aim both pistols at his side and be sure to
hit him, so that he may not be long in torture. He kneels
and gives the signal, and, just as the two banditti pull trig-
ger, throws himself flat upon his face between them, so
that they shoot each other.

This is a variation from the manner in which Hamlet
outwits his enemies, as narrated in the history of Belle-
forest, and as given in all other editions of the drama, and
may be a change made by the German adapters. There
is one reason, however, for thinking that the change was
made by Shakespeare, and that, later, he returned to the
original story.

In our " Hamlet" of to-day, the division into acts is of
comparatively recent date. The last scene of Act III.
and the first scene of Act IV. are closely connected both
in time and interest, but a long interval of time elapses
between the close of Scene IV. of the fourth act and
the opening of Scene V. Here it is that the fourth act
should begin ; but to divide the acts here leaves Act III.
very long and Act IV. very short, — less than half the
length of its predecessor. Hence, to equalize the length
of the acts, four scenes properly connected with the move-
ment in Act III. are disconnected from it and tacked on to

DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY. 33

the fourth act. " Fratricide Punished," however, divides
the acts at the point equivalent to the interval between the
fourth and fifth scenes of the fourth act, and yet these
two acts in this version are of about equal length. In
our present drama the third act has been lengthened by
the introduction of Hamlet's first interview with Ophelia,
which, both in the first quarto and in the German play,
occurs in the second act. The shortness of the proper
fourth act can be best accounted for by the supposition
that something has been cut out which originally filled it
out to its due length, and this something appears to be
the scene in the German drama in which Hamlet and the
banditti are found upon the island, this scene having
been at first replaced, to some extent, by the interview
between Horatio and the queen, which is given in the
first quarto but omitted in the later editions. These
changes having made the original third act too long and
the fourth too short, they have been equalized by the easy
process of piecing the two together and then separating
them near the middle, regardless of the original point
of juncture.

Another instance of transposition of scenes is shown by
the German tragedy, in which the court scene is placed at
the end of the first act and after Hamlet had learned from
his father's spirit the truth as to the murder ; and it is
this which at first accounted for the settled melancholy
which so alarmed the king.

When the grave-diggers' scene was introduced, it be-
came necessary to remove the announcement of the death
of Ophelia, which in the German tragedy was made in the
last scene of the play, to the end of the fourth act. In

3

34 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

the German drama, as in the first quarto, the depth of
Hamlet's apparent madness is more fully insisted upon,
and is made to more closely resemble the brutish idiocy
which the hero of Belleforest's narration took upon himself.
/ The reason for the delay in Hamlet's revenge is not
found so much in the character of Hamlet as in the sur-
rounding circumstances : again and again it is stated to be
the number of guards with which the king is surrounded,
and the difficulty of finding him unguarded :

" My worthy friend Horatio, through this assumed madness
I hope to get the opportunity of revenging my father's death.
You know, however, that my father is always surrounded by
many guards ; therefore it may miscarry. Should you chance
to find my dead body, let it be honorably buried ; for at the
first opportunity I will try my chance with him."

"Unfortunate prince ! how much longer must thou live with-
out peace ? How long dost thou delay, O righteous Nemesis !
' before thou whettest thy righteous sword of vengeance for my
uncle, the fratricide? Hither have I come once more, but can-
not attain to my revenge, because the fratricide is surrounded
v all the time by so many people.7'

The reason given for not killing the king at his prayers
is that by then cutting him down, Hamlet would take upon
himself any sins which he was about to confess.

The characteristic exclamation, u A rat ! a rat !" uttered
by Hamlet when he hears the listening Polonius, does not
occur in " Fratricide Punished," but instead the question,
'• Who is that listening to us ?" Here, too, Hamlet neither
so eulogizes Horatio, nor so reviles and mocks Polonius, as
in the English version.

The soliloquies, the introspection, the cynicism, the

DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY. ;;:,

irony, of Hamlet, are all wanting, and nothing of the
mystery that enveils the hero whom we have learned to
love enshrouds the early Hamlet.

The date of this form of the drama is fixed, with almost
absolute certainty, to a period within a few years after
1589, by the fact that when, after the death of Polonius,
or Corambis, the king proposes to send Hamlet to England,
the latter replies, —

" Ay, ay, King ; just send me off to Portugal, so that I
may never come back again."

Dr. Latham was the first to call attention, in this con-
nection, to the fact that in an expedition to Portugal, in
1589, of twenty-one thousand soldiers and eleven hundred
gentlemen, eleven thousand of the soldiers and seven hun-
dred and fifty of the gentry perished. It is this, undoubt-
edly, to which Hamlet refers, and the probability is that
the allusion was first made very soon after the unfortunate
event and while it was fresh in the minds of the people.

A striking indication that this German tragedy was an
adaptation from an earlier play in a foreign tongue, which
was, at least partly, translated from memory of its for-
eign original, is the fact that in the allusion to Roscius the
actor the name is given as Marus Russig. Latham calls
attention to the fact that there were two Roscii, and that
Cicero delivered an oration in defence of both. One was
Roscius the actor; the other, Sextus Roscius Amerinm,
who was no actor at all. It is possible that Shakespeare,
when first writing the tragedy, confused the two Roscii
and gave the name of the actor as " Roscius Amerinus,"
and that this error was blindly followed ana the name still
farther confused in the German adaptation. In later re-

36 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

visions of the English play, the error was corrected by
striking out " Amerinus." The blunder is one which a
learned man might inadvertently commit, but which an
uneducated man could not make, and J furnishes a proof
that, however or whenever the youthful Shakespeare ac-
quired something of a classical education, he did succeed
in obtaining more of an education than he has usually been
inven credit for.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER.

TAKEN all in all, there seems to be strong reason for
believing that Shakespeare first wrote u Hamlet" as one of
his earliest plays, if not his earliest ; that in this early ver-
sion he changed the old story, by making the murder of
the king a secret fratricide and by introducing the ghost
of Hamlet's father to reveal the murder and urge his son
to vengeance, and that the character of Hamlet was not
then developed into its present consummate bundle of
human contradictions or enveloped in its present baffling
mystery ; that nevertheless it was at first received with
great popular favor, and did much to establish the renown
of the young dramatist, who at that time was scarcely
known to be also a poet ; that at some future date,
very possibly soon after the death of his son Hamnet in
August, 1596, inspired to the work by a tender recollec-
tion of his child, he rewrote the play entirely, making
many radical changes, and for the first time developing the
character of the hero into some intimate relationship to
the " Hamlet" with which we are acquainted ; and that
finally, in the maturity of his powers, say some time be-
tween 1600 and 1604, he took this offspring of his early
genius and carefully revised and rewrote it, enlarging it to
almost as much again as it was, and so leaving it at last,

37

38 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

after some fifteen years of thought and study and repeated
trials, in the perfect shape in which the world has since
known it.

The strongest argument that has been produced to op-
pose the theory that the early tragedy of " Hamlet" was
written by Shakespeare is that Francis Meres, in 1598,
mentions with commendation the names of twelve of
Shakespeare's plays, and that " Hamlet" does not appear
in the list, while u Titus Andronicus" is included. Meres.
however, did not pretend to give a complete list of Shake-
speare's plays, and omits " Pericles" and " Henry the
Sixth." While it would be strange if he should omit our
" Hamlet," had it then been known, it is not strange that
the name should be omitted from his list if it is admitted
that the " Hamlet" of that day was the crude tragedy of
which " Fratricide Punished" is a fair representative.
When standing alone, it was striking and popular, but its
first burst of popularity had long since worn off, and its
glory had been eclipsed by the beams of Shakespeare's
later dramas, so that Meres, when appealing to his list of
plays representative of the genius of Shakespeare, could
point to a dozen others more worthy of renown than this
first production of his immature genius. It is an evidence
of our great author's consummate powers that he could
develop this first rough sketch into his crowning master-
piece.

Let it not be thought strange that the play should be
revised so many times. There is much reason to believe
that it was a common practice to rearrange and rewrite old
plays. It appears from Henslowe's memorandum book
that within about two years, from the summer of 1594 to

DEVELOPMENT OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER. 31)

that of 1596, no less than forty new plays were got up and
acted, being an average of one each eighteen days. No
inventive power could stand this constant drain or continue
to produce absolutely new plays with this rapidity. We
know that Shakespeare, like other dramatists of his age,
thought it no harm to take plots of earlier authors, and
even much of their language, and recast them into new
forms. If he could improve upon the older play, then the
world was so much the better for the improvement. There
was not that fear of being accused of plagiarism that now
exists. The improvement was the excuse, and the suffi-
cient excuse, for the appropriation.

In the same way that the dramatists of that age felt
themselves at liberty to improve upon the works of their
predecessors whenever they could, they also believed in
revising their own plays whenever they thought they
could better them, and it appears to have been a common
practice, when representing old plays, to produce them
with such changes as the riper experience of the author
might dictate. A number of Shakespeare's works bear
evidence of such revision ; and if it is thought that the
number of changes claimed in the progress of " Hamlet"
to its present state is beyond all precedent, the facts that
'• Hamlet" was probably one of his earliest works, and
that it was finally worked up into his masterpiece, are suffi-
cient to account for them all.

Every word ~oF~" Hamlet" is" pregnant with meaning.
The story can only be really read by a careful collation of
almost numberless little incidental allusions, which, pieced
together, reveal some point that careless readers, by the
score, rush over and never even suspect. } Even many

/

40 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

earnest students seem to fail to catch much that " Hamlet'5
has to teach them, and few, if any, have so pondered over
the magical pages that further study does not reveal beau-
ties before unknown.

It is in the tale told by these delicate hints, far more
than in the ground-work of the drama, that the second
quarto differs from the first. This perfect art was not an
inspiration, but the result of tender, brooding care, long-
continued, of patient trials and re-trials, and of numerous
takings apart and fitting together again, until each word
should fit perfectly into its place and have its story ready
for him who would but listen to it. Shakespeare thought
into this creation of his brain all that we can think out
of it, and only something of the same, patient, loving,
long-continued carrying of it in our mind and heart
that he exercised when evolving it can enable us t<»
detect even the larger portion of that which he builded
into it.

So much, then, for the history of our story. It remains
to be seen whether a comparison of the character and
surroundings of Hamlet in our received version, with
those of earlier forms of the play, united with a careful
study of the character in itself, and of the scenes in which
he was placed, can do anything to remove the veil of
mystery that surrounds him, and enable us to see him
with the eyes of his maker.

The ancient story of the Danish Prince from which
Shakespeare drew his first conception of our drama
broadly sketches a few events, — too few by far to furnish
incidents for a five-act play, to hold the boards for three
hours or more.

DEVELOPMENT OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER. 41

The king is openly struck down by his brother, who is
inspired by a desire for the rulership and by a guilty pas-
sion for the queen. He jpeclaims that he found the king-
about to kill the queen, and that in attempting to defend
her he was obliged to put her assailant to death. His
story is believed, his course is applauded, and he is in-
vested with the crown. The queen, partly through fear
of the revenge that he might take upon herself and her
son if she denied his word, and partly as the result of her
former criminal conduct, although she has not plotted the
death of her husband, fails to contradict the assertion, and
soon marries the usurper. Her son, fearing for his life
and anxious to obtain an opportunity for revenging his
father's murder, decides that he can best protect the one
and secure the other by feigning idiocy^ and therefore, to
carry out the part which he had concluded to play, he rent
and tore his clothes, wallowed in the mire, and went about
filthy and distraught, all his actions being those of a man
wholly deprived of all reason and understanding. The
king, believing that his apparent madness was assumed,
endeavored to entrap him by means of a young woman,
but he, being forewarned by a faithful friend, escaped the
snare that was laid for him. An over-officious courtier
endeavored to entrap him in confidential conversation with
his mother, and, like the later Polonius, was slain for his
pains ; and the following interview between Hamlet and
his mother was closely reproduced by Shakespeare. The
king, fearing to kill him openly, resolved to send him to
England in charge of two of his courtiers, who took with
them letters to the King of England desiring that Hamlet
might be put to death. He, however, changed the letters

42 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

so that his companions suffered that fate, and he returned
to Denmark.

When he readied his home, he found that the court-
iers, supposing him dead, were celebrating his funeral by
a general carousal. Hamlet's unexpected return only
provoked them to still deeper drinking, and the prince,
volunteering to play the butler, kept them so well supplied
with liquor that they soon were all stupefied. Hamlet
then threw down the hangings about the wall, and, nailing
them fast about his unconscious enemies, set fire to the
hall.

Having so disposed of the multitude who had surrounded
the king, and through fear of whom he had hitherto been
restrained from attacking him, he now visited the chamber
of his father's murderer, and slew him, with the words,
" Now go thy wayes, and when thou commest in hell, see
thou forget not to tell thy brother (whom thou trayterously
slewest), that it was his sonne that sent thee thither ;" — an
expression which is repeated in the words of Richard III.
when stabbing his predecessor :

"Down, down to hell ; and say I sent tbee thither."

Hamlet, having so accomplished his revenge, addressed
the multitude who were drawn to the spot by the burning
of the palace, in an oration so eloquent and touching that
all were convinced of the truth of his story and with one
consent proclaimed him " King of Jutie and Chersonnese,
at this present the proper country of Denmarke."

This is but a slender story to serve as the foundation of
a five-act drama, and much constructive skill is requisite
to continue the play through its three hours' course with

DEVELOPMENT OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER. 43

a sustained interest throughout. The introduction of the
. ghost ; of Ophelia, maddened by the death of her father ;
Laertes, clamorous for revenge^ of the court fool and
the peasant, afterwards replaced by Osric and the grave-
diggers, gives the piece its necessary length ; but now a
new difficulty is met.

In reading the old story, no hesitation or vacillation in N
the prince is apparent ; events move quickly in the story,
and although much delay really occurred, it does not strike
the reader. The excuse that, as the king was constantly
surrounded by an armed guard, Hamlet was compelled to
wait for a fitting opportunity, seems plausible, until the
play is put upon the stage ; then it is evident that a young ^
hero, panting with desire to revenge his father's untimely
death, would "sweep to" his " revenge,"

"And for his means, would husband them so well,
They should go far with little."

Laertes, in the form of the play given in " Fratricide
Punished," comes mildly into the presence of the king,
and says, —

u Gracious lord and king, I demand of your majesty my
father, or just vengeance for his lamentable murder. If
this be not done, I shall forget that you are king, and re-
venge myself on him who has done the deed."

Later, however, in order to more fully contrast his
character with that of Hamlet, he, with far less cause to
seek revenge, in an instant brushes away the excuse as to
the number of attendants constantly surrounding the king,
and, raising, a body of followers, overpowers the guards and
forces his way to the presence of the usurper :

44 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

" To hell, allegiance ! vows, to the blackest devil !
Conscience and grace, to the profoimdest pit !
I dare damnation : — to this point I stand, —
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what conies ; only I'll be revenged
Most thoroughly for my father."

The exigencies of the play, however, deny such a
course to Hamlet. The death of the king is the end of
the drama : hence it must be delayed until the play has
run its proper length. Although the original tragedy was
probably not more than half the length of that which
we now have, even in this short form it soon was evi-
dent that the excuses that were given for the delay were
not sufficient. Hamlet»might have made an opportunity :
if no better had occurred, he might at least have taken
that which fortune sent him when he found the murderer
at prayer. He must not seize it, however, for the play
had not run its proper course, and yet he could not fail to
grasp it without forfeiting the character of an earnest,
loving, heroic son, consumed with desire to revenge the
foul wrongs of his most foully betrayed and murdered
father.

Now it is that the genius of our mighty poet is shown*
He sweeps away all excuses drawn from surrounding cir-
cumstances, and places the obstacles to instant action in
the character of the prince himself. How consummate is
the skill which can create such a character, lacking in
many of the most important elements that seem essential
to a noble, princely nature, and yet so fine that all hu-
manity is proud to own its kinship, and feels only pity for
its sorrows, untinged by contempt for its weaknesses !

DEVELOPMENT OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER. 45

None other than Shakespeare would dare to make the at-
tempt to present a hero of this stamp, or, daring, would
have met with aught but ignominious failure.

It does not seem to have been the original Hamlet of
Shakespeare : scarcely any of the perplexing contradic-
tions of Hamlet's mind are met in " Fratricide Punished,"
and many of them are lacking in the first quarto of 1603.
The real growth of the play, as it was re-cast from time
to time, was mainly in the development of this charac-
ter, and, to some extent, at least, it is probably true that
Shakespeare wrote rather as he must than as he would.
His mighty creation must have almost mastered him.
Given the vital incidents of the drama as Shakespeare
made them, and the character of the prince gradually
evolved itself into that which we know it to be, and he
who called him into being could hardly stay the process
or change the result, even if he were disposed to do so.

Hamlet talked rather than acted, dallied with oppor-
tunity rather than seized it, because an overwhelming fate
decreed that he was to be what he was.

CHAPTER V.

THE TYPE OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER.

As Hamlet lacks the energy, the conscious strength, the
readiness for action that inhere in the perfect manly char-
acter, how comes it that humanity still admires him ? Is
not the answer to this query found in the fact that there
are two types of human perfection, and that in just the
same degree in which he was found to lack the essential
qualities, of one of these types, he took upon himself the
perfections of the other ?

When Grod created man in his own image, male and
female created he them.

There is not only a masculine type of human perfection,
but also a feminine type ; and when it became evident that
Hamlet was born lacking in many of the elements of
virility, there grew up in him, as compensation, many of
.the perfections of character more properly the crown, of
the better half of the human race. All mankind has
recognized the deep humanity of the melancholy prince,
and many have been puzzled to find that they were in-
stinctively compelled to bow before him in admiration,
while still finding in him so many faults and weaknesses.
The depths of human nature which Shakespeare touched
in him have been felt by all, but it has scarcely been
46

THE TYPE OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER. 4*7

recognized that the charms of Hamlet's mind are essen-
tially feminine in their nature.

The masculinity of Lady Macbeth has been universally
admitted. With a woman's body she united the steady
courage, the unyielding resolution, that are properly mas-
culine.

Lady Macbeth and Hamlet are counterparts. Each is
gifted with a mind naturally noble, but misplaced in tl;e
body through which it acts, and warped by the unfavora-
ble circumstances by which it is surrounded. Could Ham- ,
let and Lady Macbeth have changed characters, neither
drama would have been possible. Hamlet with Lady
Macbeth's resolution would instantly have slain his father's
murderer, and she with his natural sweetness of mind, and
disposition to drift with circumstances rather than to con-
trol them, would have lived and died with no foul crime
upon her soul, to trouble her with thick-coming fancies, to
keep her from her rest and wear her to her death.

Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear constitute a trilogy of vari-
ants of one central theme, — the action of a noble soul
under circumstances the most adverse to its development
that can be imagined ; in all, insanity is portrayed and the
atmosphere of another world seems to surround the spec-
tator. V

Gentleness, and more or less of dependence upon others,
are inherent qualities of the feminine nature, and Hamlet
possessed both.

Woman, with less of strength to accomplish her desires
by straightforward action, is compelled to bring them to
pass by more of shrewdness and subtlety. Where strength
fails, finesse succeeds ; and therefore Hamlet plans and

48 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

plots. His feigned madness, his trial of the mimic play,
are stratagems that a woman might attempt, and that are
far more in keeping with a feminine than with a masculine
nature.

That Hamlet preferred to win by indirect means, rather

v than by driving straight forward to accomplish his end, is

a peculiarity of his nature that has attracted the attention

Says Dr. Maudsley, —

" Let it not any longer escape attention that the delib-
erate feigning of insanity was an act in strict conformity
with Hamlet's character ; he was by nature something of
a dissimulator, — that faculty having been born in him. . . .
Strange as it may seem, we not uncommonly observe the
character of the mother, with her emotional impulses and
subtle but scarce conscious shifts, in the individual when
young, while the calm deliberation and conscious determi-
nation of the father come out more plainly as he grows
older. Setting aside any necessity which Shakespeare
might think himself under to follow the old play, it is in
Hamlet's inherited disposition to dissimulation that we
find the only explanation of his deliberately feigning mad-
ness, when, to all appearances, policy would have been
much better served if he had not so feigned. But he has
a love of the secret way for its own sake ; to hoist the
engineer with his own petard is to him a most attractive
prospect; and he breaks out into positive exultation at
the idea of outwitting Ilosencrantz and Guildenstern, with
whom he was to go to England."

Schlegel, too, notes this disposition :

" He is not solely impelled by necessity to artifice and

THE TYPE OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER. 49

dissimulation ; he has a natural inclination to go crooked
ways; he is a hypocrite toward himself; his far-fetched
scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of reso-
lution : thoughts, as he says on a different occasion, which
have but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward."

As woman, unable to fight her battles by force of arms, '^
finds in the power of speech a more efficient weapon, so
Hamlet, if words could kill, would have accomplished his /
revenge

" With wings as swift
As meditation, or the thoughts of love."

He himself seems to feel that this disposition to ex-
pend resolution in words is womanish, for he exclaims, —

11 This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell , •=/-

Must . . . fall a cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion ! fie upon't !" /

Carl llohrbach, commenting upon this disposition,
says, —

u He always talks more than is necessary : ... At all -y
events, he can under this mask [of madness] give free play
to his tongue, and that, and not the use of his hands,
suits him above all things. Were he a whole man and no y
weakling, and if he would go wisely to work, why does he
not at least keep his mouth shut? . . . He is a weakling.
When he says, ' Frailty, thy name is woman,' he might
have used his own name here."

Hazlitt remarks of the character of Hamlet, —

"It is not a character marked by strength of will, or
4

50 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment.
Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be. . . .

" The character of Hamlet is made up of undulating
lines ; it has the yielding flexibility of c a wave o' th'
sea.' . . .

" He is full of weakness and melancholy, but there is
no harshness in his nature. He is the most amiable of
misanthropes."

Are not these characteristics thoroughly feminine ?

Let us not be deceived by the plea that Hamlet does
not needlessly procrastinate but merely wisely bides his
time.

How clearly Bacon describes the drift of Hamlet's
mind ! "To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but a
bravery of the stoics. We have better oracles. ... In
refraining from anger, it is the best remedy to win time,
and to make a man's self believe that the opportunity of
his revenge is not yet come ; but that he foresees a time
for it, and so to still himself, in the mean time, and re-
serve it."

So Hamlet, letting pass an unexceptionable opportunity
for revenge, exclaims, —

" " Up, sword ; and know them a more horrid bent : . . .
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days."

This was no horrible refinement of cruelty, but a mere
make-shift to win time.

The true secret of Hamlet's dalliance lies, partly at

, in a fear of death. It was not so difficult to find an
opportunity as it was certain that the king's death would

THE TYPE OF HAMLET'S CHARACTER. 51

immediately be revenged by the destruction of his slayer.
This it is that supplies the clue to his soliloquy :

" To be, or not to be, — that is the question : —
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them ? — To die "

*

The question in Hamlet's mind is whether he piiall take
a course which will insure his own safety and enable him
to continue to live, and so " to be," or whether he shall,
by assaulting the king, invite his own death, and so ex-
tinguish his own earthly being. Shall Hamlet be or not
be? — that is the question with him. He sees Jhat it is
possible for him to end his troubles by taking arms and
actively opposing them, but that such a course will prob-
ably be followed by his own death, and from that prospect
he shrinks, and, after stating why it is that

" Thus conscience does make cowards of us all ;"
he adds, —

a And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
"With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action." f

The enterprise of great pith and moment which Hamlet
had in view was the revenge of the foul murder done to
his father, and the reason clearly given by him why he
allowed this enterprise to " lose the name of action" is that

52 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

11 The dread of something after death, —
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, — puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of."

This shuddering recoil from even the possibility of death
h$s been passed unnoticed by many commentators, but has
attracted the attention of a few, among them being Mr.
Jones Very, who in an essay published in 1839 expressed
his belief as to Hamlet's mental state in the following
words :

" It is to this condition that Hamlet has been reduced.
. . . He fears nothing save the loss of existence. . . .
This is the hinge on which his every endeavor turns.
Such a thought as this might well prove more than an
equal counterpoise to any incentive to what we call
action. . . . The thoughts of this soliloquy are not found
to belong to a particular part of the play, but to be the
spirit of the whole. ' To be, or not to le,' is written
over its every scene, from the entrance of the ghost
to the rude inscription over the gateway of the church-
yard."

XTXlthougb the love of life is instinctive in all animate
creatures, this timid shrinking from its possible loss, this
resolution to bear even the murder of his father, the pol-
lution of his mother, the theft of his crown, rather than to
run any risk by attempting to end his ills, is certainly not
x. what we should expect from a noble prince, the son of a
man who did not shrink from meeting Fortinbras hand in
hand in a mortal struggle. This dread of something after
death it was that induced him to

THE TYPE OF HAMLET :S CHARACTER. 53

" Bather bear those ills he had,
Than fly to others that he knew not of,"

notwithstanding that weariness which he suffered from the
weight of the burdens laid upon him, which caused him to
despairingly wish that

" The Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter."

His weariness of life is shown again in his disconsolate
reply to Polonius's

<; My honorable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of
you."

"You cannot, Sir, take from me anything that I will more
willingly part withal, — except my life, except my life, except

No slur is meant in saying that this half-confessed
shrinking of Hamlet from the role that fate had called
upon him to play is what we should expect from a gently-
nurtured woman, rather than from a fervid young prince
glowing with desire to end unequalled wrongs.

0 CHAPTER VI.

HAMLETS NATURE ESSENTIALLY FEMININE.

f IN the impulsiveness which causes the hasty exclama-
tion,—

u Unhand me, gentlemen ; —
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me !;J

which induces him to jump into Ophelia's open grave with
Laertes, which leads him to slay Polonius the instant that
he sees the hangings stir, and which enables him at last to
take his full revenge upon the spur of the moment and
without premeditation, we see another feminine trait; and
/ still another in that love of obtaining the advantage in a
^ wordy warfare, which induces him to tantalize and mock
at Polonius and Osric. How skilfully can he use his
tongue, and how readily does he flay with it all with whom
he comes in contact, save only one, — Horatio.

In his disgust at the c: heavy-headed revel" of the king
and his companions, in his u pretty oaths," — " Angels and
ministers of grace defend us !" — " By heaven, I'll make a
ghost of him that lets me !" — " By heaven, I'll have it !"-
" Yes, by heaven !" — in his fear of breaking into tears. —

" Do not look upon me ;
Lest with this piteous action you convert
54

HIS NATURE ESSENTIALLY FEMININE. 55

My stern effects : then what I have to do

Will want true color ; tears, perchance, for blood ;" —

in all, we see traits more characteristic of the gentler than
of the sterner sex.

But far more strange than all these is the fact that all*
his admiration is for manly strength and manly virtues,
while upon feminine peculiarities, upon womankind in
general, and upon his mother and Ophelia in particular,
he pours out all the bitterness of his detestation. Here
is an anomaly almost against nature. The Creator has
planted in humanity a subtle attraction toward the oppo-
site sex, which in a man, and particularly in a man of
Hamlet's age, invests all womankind with a tender charm.
Each sex admires the characteristic virtues of the other
and thinks slightly of its own good qualities. As in two
magnets similar poles repel each other while the opposite
poles attract, so in the human race this mutual attraction
between opposites and repulsion of counterparts exists.
This frequently makes the tie between mother and son,
father and daughter, more strong and tender than between
father and son or mother and daughter.

In Hamlet, however, we find an entire inversion of 'what
we should have expected. His admiration is expended
upon men and masculine perfections alone. His eulogy
of man, —

"What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving, how expn---
and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in appre-
hension, how like a god ! the beauty of the worldj tlio
paragon of animals!" —

56 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

his panegyrics of his father, —

u He was a man, take him for all in all. . . .
See, what a grace was seated on this brow :
Hyperion :s curls : the front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command ;
A station like the herald Mercury,
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill ;
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man:" —

and his dying appeal to Horatio, —

" As thou'rt a man,
Give me the cup :" —

show how earnest and deep-seated was his regard for a
perfect manly character. This striking appreciation of
masculine excellence was combined with an equally re-
markable detestation of all womankind and aversion to
womanly qualities. Witness his well-known phrase, —

"Frailty, thy name is woman !"
his reply to Ophelia's

" 'Tis brief, my lord."
" As woman's love ;"
and his

u Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her
paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come."

In his treatment of Ophelia and of his mother this trait

HIS NATURE ESSENTIALLY FEMININE. 57

is exhibited still more powerfully : in fact, such is the ab-
horrence which he expresses of their frailties and weak-
nesses that it irresistibly suggests the question, Is not this
more like the bitterness of one woman against the failings
of another, than like the half compassion, " more in sor-
row than in anger," with which a man regards a feminine
weakness? Is not this railing, in which he " out-herods
Herod" and is ever " o'erdoing Termagant." more suggest-
ive of the asperity with which women are thought to
regard the misdoings of their sisters, than of any dis-
pleasure with which their sterner companions view the
same faults?

It may even be asked of his bitter harangue -against the
tender Ophelia, whether it is possible that any young man
of refined training and possessing any real nobility of char-
acter could so scourge the maiden whom he has at least
pretended to love, whom he has but slight apparent cause
so to strike down with brutal words, and who meets his
bitterness only with mild and gentle replies :

"Wise men well know what monsters 3^011 make of them.
... I have heard of your paintings too, well enough : God
has given you one face, and you make yourselves another ;
you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's crea-
tures, and make your wantonness your ignorance."

Did ever a noble youth so abuse and insult a lovely
gentle girl ?

The only scenes in Shakespeare which can be compared
with this (and these are but feeble hints of the district
and acerbity which are exhibited with cruel intensification
in this interview between Hamlet and Ophelia) are those

58 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

in which the disguised Viola, in her conference with Olivia,
shows a woman's natural suspicion of that

" Beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on,"

and says, —

" Excellently done, if God did all,"
and soon after adds, —

" I see what you are: you are too proud ;"

and the other scene, in which the disguised Rosalind, with
a woman's frankness in relation to another woman's
charms, retaliates upon Phebe for her cruelty to Sylvius
by saying —

u What though you have more beauty,
(As, by my faith, I see no more in you
Than without candle may go dark to bed,)
Must you be therefore proud and pitiless ?
Why, what means this ? Why do you look on me ?
I see no more in you than in the ordinary
Of nature's sale-work. Od's my little life !
I think she means to tangle my eyes too. —
No, faith, proud mistress, hope not after it.
'Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair,
Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream,
That can entame my spirits to your worship. —
. . . Mistress, know yourself; down on your knees,
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love :
For I must tell you friendly in your ear, —
Sell when you can ; you are not for all markets."

HIS NATURE ESSENTIALLY FEMININE. 59

Taking Hamlet's taunts of Ophelia by themselves, it
might be imagined that in this scene, as in the others just
referred to, the apparently masculine railer was in reality
but a woman attempting to play a man's part.

The question may be asked, whether Shakespeare, having
been compelled by the course and exigencies of the drama
to gradually modify his original hero into a man with more
and more of the feminine element, may not at last have
had the thought dawn upon him that this womanly man
might be in very deed a woman, desperately striving to
fill a place for which she was by nature unfitted, and, in
her failure to do that which it was impossible for her to
do, earning an admiration and a pity which no mere weak-
ling, dawdling about his proper task and meanly failing to
achieve it, could inspire.

It is not claimed that any such thought was in our im-
mortal poet's mind when first he conceived and put the
drama into shape : the evidence is strongly to the contrary.
It is not even claimed that Shakespeare ever fully intended
to represent Hamlet as indeed a woman. It -is claimed
that in the gradual evolution of the feminine element in
Hamlet's character the time arrived when it occurred to
the dramatist that so might a woman act and feel, if edu-
cated from infancy to play a prince's part, and that there-
after the changes in the character and in the play were all
in the direction of a development of this idea. Yery
possibly the poet half juggled with himself in the matter. •
It is related of Thackeray, — like Shakespeare, but half
appreciated by his own generation, — that when asked to
finish the story of il Vanity Fair" by disclosing whether
Becky Sharp killed Joseph, he answered, :' I don't know/'

60 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

So may Shakespeare have said of Hamlet. That the
idea of Hamlet's femininity was in Shakespeare's mind,
that he at least entertained the thought, dallied with it,
and re- worded much of the drama to further develop
it and remove all that was inconsistent with it, we shall
endeavor to prove.

Let not the strangeness of this idea lead to its instant
rejection, without consideration, but rather " as a stranger
give it welcome."

Before considering the facts which more directly tend
to confirm the view above suggested, it will be proper to
remember what a favorite fancy it was of Shakespeare's
to allow his heroines to masquerade in male attire. He
seems to have had an intuitive fondness for placing his
characters in the situations most foreign to their natural
dispositions, and then allowing their natural peculiarities
to show themselves and reveal the real nature of the human
being whom he had created, in spite of all disguises and
through them all.

In "King Lear," for instance, the drama, when it opens,
shows us a man at the summit of human prosperity, — the
king of a noble realm, surrounded by only those who hasten
to do his will ; with many apparent friends, and at least
one true friend ; with three children whom he believed to
love him, and of whom at least one possessed an unsur-
passed depth of true and fond affection for him ; with
riches and possessions so great that no more could be de-
sired ; with no want ungratified, no need unsupplied.
Him, so rich, we see almost instantly stripped of all his
blessings: his fair-weather friends desert him; his children
conspire against him ; his possessions are put away by his

HIS NATURE ESSENTIALLY FEMININE. <;l

own hands and he is powerless to take them again; hi>
one true friend is driven from him ; his one loving child
is an outcast ; he himself is driven out into a wintry storm,
with scarcely clothing enough to cover him and with no
shelter to protect him from the tempest. Finally, even
his last possession, his mind, is taken from him, and he
has nothing left. The change is the greatest that it is in
our power to conceive, and in this unexampled change the
true character of the man is revealed.

The same genius that led Shakespeare to delight in so
radical a transformation as this led him also to delight in
fancying how his characters would act if called upon to
fill the role of a person of the other sex. There is but
little ropm fer pleasure in fancying a man essaying to play
a woman's part ; but when the role is reversed a situation
is created which appears to have attracted our author with
an irresistible fascination, and of which he seems never
to have tired. Imogen, Viola, Rosalind, Julia, Portia. — -
how he plays the changes on this one theme and never
wearies of it ! In all these, however, the disguise is but
temporary : before the comedy ends each retakes her
proper character ; but in a tragedy the part once taken
must be a life-long bondage, with no escape but death. /

CHAPTER VII.

HAMLET'S LOVE FOR HORATIO AND JEALOUSY OF
OPHELIA.

WE have already glanced at some of the feminine pe-
culiarities of Hamlet's mind, and have noticed not only
his detestation of womanly weaknesses but also his regard
for the character of a perfect man. In this connection
let us recur to the affection of Hamlet for Horatio, with
the question whether it is not rather the love with which
•i woman in Hamlet's position might have regarded him,
than any mere friendship, such as may be supposed to
exist between old-time fellow-collegians. It is evident
that this depth of intimacy had not existed when they
were both at Wittenberg ; there they had become some-
what acquainted, but, from the difference in rank between
the Prince of Denmark, the heir-apparent to the crown,
and the fortuneless Horatio, who

" No revenue had but his good spirit-,
To feed and clothe him,v

or for some other cause, their relations had been so far
from familiar that Horatio had come from Wittenberg to
attend the late king's funeral, and had remained about the
court for some two months without having been seen by
his former fellow-student. From the time, however, when
62

HAMLET'S LOVE AND JEALOUS!'. (]:\

Horatio and Marcellus bad revealed to him that they had
seen his father's spirit, and when they together had watched
for its return, we find Hamlet and Horatio almost con-
stantly together, bound to each other by a friendship almost
unequalled. Hamlet will not reveal the secret of the mission
of his father's ghost to Horatio and Marcellus while the two
are together, buT: at the first opportunity he seems to have
disclosed the story fully to Horatio, alone, for the next
time that Horatio appears upon the stage Hamlet speaks

to him of

"The circumstance,
Which I have told thee, of my father's death/'

In the interview between Hamlet and the queen, the
former speaks of his knowledge of the king's purpose to
send him to England, although there is nothing to show
how he came to learn of this plan. It has been suggested
that he had managed to place Horatio in some office or
employment about the court, and that through him he
may have learned this secret.

When Hamlet escapes from the ship in which he was
being carried to England, his first action is to write to
Horatio, telling him as much as is safe to intrust to a letter,
and beseeching him, " Repair them to me with as much
haste as thou wouldst fly death." The letter ends, " He
that thou knowest thine," — a signature in striking contraM
to that affixed to his letter to Ophelia.

In the grave-yard scene Hamlet and Horatio enter to-
gether, and the next scene opens with the words addressed
by the prince to his faithful friend, —

" So much for this, sir ; now let me see the other."

64 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

It is evident that this opening phrase ends the narration
by Horatio to Hamlet of the incidents that had occurred
at the court since the latter' s departure, including the mad-
ness and death of Ophelia. This is followed by a full re-
lation by Hamlet of his adventures at sea. In this scene
Hamlet appears almost nervously anxious that Horatio
shall approve of his course. He seeks to stifle his pity for
the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by represent-
ing their treachery and their love for their base employ-
ment ; he asks Horatio's approval of his intended attack
upon the king, and apologizes to him for his assault upon
Laertes.

Among the ills enumerated by Hamlet in his soliloquy,
most of which were those which he himself had expe-
rienced, is that caused by " the pangs of disprized love."
In the first quarto this line is lacking ; in the second and
third quartos it appears as " despiz'd love," which is changed
in the folios to the form above given : and this change, with
the delicate shade of new meaning in the new word, makes
the phrase peculiarly applicable to the love that we may
imagine Hamlet to have had for Horatio. Furness re-
marks,—

" A love that is disprized falls more frequently to the
lot of man, and is perhaps more hopeless in its misery,
than a love that is despised. As Corson says, ' Perhaps a
disprized or undervalued love, a love that is only partially
appreciated and responded to, would be apt to suffer more
pangs than a despised love.' After all, this passage is
merely one of the numberless puzzles in the text of Shake-
speare."

Horatio did not despise the affection of Hamlet, but he

HAMLET'S LOVE AND JEALOUSY. 65

can have had but the dimmest apprehension of the depth
of Hamlet's whole-hearted love and never suspected the
true cause of the latter's confidence in him. Hence Hamlet
could not but have felt that his love was and must ever
remain " disprized."

His eulogy of Horatio in the third act is characterized
by a warmth of fondness and admiration far greater than
is natural between friends of the same sex :

u Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man
As e'er my conversation coped withal. . . .
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal'd thee for herself.
. . . Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.
As 1 do thee."

Then, fearing that fervor had led to protestation too
strong, this evidence of feeling is suppressed with the
words, —

u Something too much of this."

Then follows an appeal for his aid in carrying out the plot
by means of which he hoped to reveal the guilt of the
king. In the last scene of all, the depth of affection be-
tween the two is strikingly shown. When first he feels
the effects of the poisoned blade, it is to Horatio that he
cries, —

" I am dead, Horatio."

And, upon Horatio's attempt to drink the poisoned draught

5

G6 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

that they may die together, he rallies all his failing strength
to wrest it from him, with the desperate cry, —

u Give me the cup ; let go ; by heaven, I'll have 't. — ....
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. . . .
. . . Oh, I die, Horatio.''

It has been noticed that all who come within the range
of Hamlet's tongue, save only Horatio, have reason to fear
that ever-ready weapon ; its lashes fall upon all alike : the
king, the queen, Ophelia, Polonius, and Osric, all, by turn,
writhe under its stings. Before Horatio, however, this
prince, so merciless to others, humbly bows for approval.

This earnest aifection for Horatio is in striking contrast
to his heartless treatment of Ophelia. The time was when,
perhaps, he could find amusement in trifling with her and
playing at love ; that it was but trifling is evident not only
from his after-conduct, but from his mocking letter to
Ophelia :

"To the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified
Ophelia/'''

It is no wonder that Polonius should have exclaimed,
" That's an ill phrase, a vile phrase ; ( beautified' is a vile
phrase." Hamlet's idea of the arts by which Ophelia was
" beautified" is explained at length in his bitter raillery at
her in his later interview with her. The body of the letter
is but a continuation of the mockery with which it com-

HAMLET'S LOVE AND JEALOUSY. 07

" Doubt thou the stars arc fire ;

Doubt that the sun doth move ;
Doubt truth to be a liar ;
But never doubt I love."

The conclusion of the king must be that of all :

11 Love ? his affections do not that way tend ;
]S"or what he spake, though it lackrd form a little,
Was not like madness."

In the scene at Ophelia's grave, there is evidence of
many other feelings ; but of love, none. He is stung by
the knowledge that it is to him that Ophelia's death is
owing, and stung by Laertes's curse upon him, but far
more deeply is he chafed by the manly vigor of Laertes
and his evident readiness to do instantly whatever fate may
require of him. He feels that he himself has shown but
scanty love for his murdered father, and has failed to fill
the part that it was his duty to perform^ Lrfris'interview
with the players, he was. cut to the heart by the feeling
that the actor who

•; But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd :
Tears in his eyes, distraction in Js aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit. And all for nothing !'' —

had he k': the motive and the cue for passion" that he him-
self had,

u Would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,

68 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

Make mad the guilty, and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears ;"

while he himself,

11 A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of his cause,
And could say nothing ; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made."

Again, when he sees the army of Fortinbras marching
to war in a dispute about a little patch of ground which
would not yield five ducats should it be sold in fee, he
feels that " all occasions do inform against" him. and that
he is exhorted by " examples gross as earth."

"How stand I then,

That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men.
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? Oh, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth !'7

So when he sees the depth of feeling which Laertes shows
at Ophelia's grave, and realizes that he would not hesitate
to do whatever it might be in his power to do to revenge
her wrongs, he is stung to the quick by the knowledge
that, however deeply he may have felt the murder of his

HAMLET'S LOVE AND JEALOUSY. 69

father, he has failed to do what Laertes would have done
if in his place. As he confesses to Horatio, —

Hence

' By the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his;" . . .

..." The bravery of his grief did put me
Into a towering passion."

When therefore he hears Laertes's wild ejaculations, he
advances, exclaiming, —

11 What is he whose grief

Bears such an emphasis ? whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane !"

He says, " I loved Ophelia ;" he means, " I loved my
father, and, prate as you will, I would do as much for him
as you for Ophelia."

" Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou.'?

All this occurs before Horatio, and it is partly the humili-
ation of feeling that Horatio may despise him when he
compares him with Laertes, that leads to this wild out-
burst.

If Hamlet be considered as in love with Horatio, his
treatment of Ophelia is easily explained as caused by
jealousy.

According to the folio editions of the drama, which may

tO THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

be considered as embodying- Shakespeare's final intention,
it is Horatio who brings to the queen the news of Ophe-
lia's madness, enlarging upon all that she says and does,
and thus proving that he must have spent much time with
her, and have been upon terms of intimacy with her.
Clarke remarks, " We think there is something exquisitely
appropriate in making Hamlet's beloved friend Horatio
the one who watches over and tenderly thinks for Ophelia
during the Prince's absence, and brings her to his mother
alone."

Upon the only occasion when the three are seen to-
gether, Hamlet carefully seats Horatio upon one side,
while he himself monopolizes Ophelia, and, notwithstand-
ing his bitter raillery of the morning of the same day
against her, he now treats her with a pretence of courtesy,
and engrosses her conversation. His coarseness treads
upon the very verge of the license allowed by the times,
and reveals anything rather than love, but to Ophelia it is
a welcome change from the bitter reproaches which he
had that day heaped upon her.

May it not have been to the intimacy between Horatio
and Ophelia that Hamlet alludes when he says to her, " If
you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no dis-
course to your beauty" ?

At this time Hamlet has in some way discovered that
listeners are posted to overhear their conversation, and that
Ophelia has lent herself to a plot to entrap him. So, in
answer to her question, " Could beauty, my lord, have
better commerce than with honesty?" he replies, —

" Ay, truly ; for the power of beauty will sooner transform
honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty

HAMLET' S LOVE AND JEALOUSY. VI

can translate beauty into his likeness ; this was sometime a
paradox, but now the time gives it proof."

May it not be that Hamlet means here that the power
of Horatio's straightforward honesty and incapacity for
deception has failed to so translate her into his likeness as
to make her incapable of joining in a plot against one
whom she has received as a lover ? His warning to Polo-
nius seems based upon some such intimacy between Hora-
tio and Ophelia as that above referred to :

'; Have you a daughter?"
11 1 have, my lord."

" Let her not walk i' the sun ; conception is a blessing ; but
not as your daughter may conceive : — Friend, look to 't."

CHAPTER VIII.

ADDITIONAL FEMININE TRAITS.

IF Hamlet were so situated as to make marriage impos-
sible, an explanation would be given of his raillery against
marriage and of the light in which he regarded it. For
him there is none of the sweetness and purity which unite
two wedded lovers, and he

" Takes off the rose

From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there.''

To be married, is, to him, but to be a breeder of sinners.
His mother's second marriage is merely

" Wicked speed, to post
"With such dexterity to incestuous sheets ;'•'

and, in his interview with his mother, his disgust at the
marital intimacy outweighs all other thoughts ; his censure
of her is evoked by that almost alone, and his words are
rather those of the diseased imagination of one shut out
from all possibility of marriage, than of the feelings im-
planted by nature in the hearts of the young, leading them
to look upon a loving marriage as the highest earthly
good, the culmination of human happiness.
72

ADDITIONAL FEMININE TRAITS. 73

It is hardly supposable that the course of the mother
could so have affected a son, or that he would use to her
such words as those we find. The reproof is rather such
as one woman might administer to another.

Hamlet's feeling regarding marriage is summed up in
his words to Ophelia :

UI say, we will have no more marriages; those that are
married already, all but one, shall live ; the rest shall keep as
they are."

His detestation of the conduct of his mother seems even
to outweigh that with which he regards the king. When
first he learns the truth, his exclamation, —

" 0 most pernicious woman !" —
comes before that of

" 0 villain, villain, smiling, damned villain !"

and this disposition seems to be well known to his father,
for he cautions him, —

11 But, howsoever thou pursues! this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught."

And Hamlet himself admits the same disposition to seek
revenge rather upon his mother than upon the murderer,

in the lines, —

" Now to my mother.
O heart, lose not thy nature ; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom ;
Let me be cruel, not unnatural ;

\

74 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

I will speak daggers to her, but use none ;
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites ;
How in my words soever she be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul, consent !"

Why should Hamlet fear that, like Nero, he might be-
come a matricide ?

Hunter, commenting upon this passage, says, —

" That the thought should arise detracts from our admi-
ration of his character, as much as it precludes approba-
tion or silent admission of the moral taste discovered in
this play by its author. It is, besides, dramatically im-
proper; for, in the first place, his mother had done noth-
ing to deserve it ; it is not even insinuated against her
that she was acquainted with the manner of her former
husband's death. Her offence was marrying again too
soon, and, in addition to this, that her second husband was
brother to the first. In the next place, such a deed would
not only delay the execution of the high behest of the
ghost, which is the main purpose of the drama, but would
in all probability have entirely frustrated it ; and Hamlet
cannot be supposed not to have foreseen that such would
be the result. Hamlet a matricide would have become
instantly an object of universal odium. In fact, the truth
cannot and ought not to be concealed that, popular as this
play is, not in England only, but all the world over, there
are parts in it which seem quite at variance with the ordi-
nary modes of thinking of its author/'

When we find faults in Shakespeare, the cause may be

rather in our own understanding than in the author's con-

/ception ; and if we imagine that the poet here portrayed a

woman incapable of accomplishing the revenge which the

ADDITIONAL FEMININE TRAITS. 75

perturbed spirit of her father had imposed upon her,
driven to the borders of distraction by unbearable burdens,
suffering from a hopeless love that she might never reveal,
tortured by jealousy, sorely sensitive to all a woman's
natural faults, and incensed far more at the sacrifice of per-
sonal purity made by her mother in marrying again so
speedily, than even by the murder of her father; shrink-
ing from the mortal struggle with the king, fearing blood-
shed, and viewing the possibility of her own death with a
shuddering horror, and hence anxious to find some escape,
some easier method of fulfilling her duty ; that which
before seemed at variance with all our ordinary modes of
thinking now becomes an exhibition of the deepest human
feeling,)

To pour upon another woman, and she an erring one,
open to censure, a volley of burning blame, was much
easier than with sword in hand to attack the king in
mortal combat. Here was a task which Hamlet could do/
efficiently, and from this he did not shrink. Poor soul !
he wanted to be firm and cruel in order to be able to carry
out the ghost's behest, and his firmness, although it
vanished at the sight of his uncle, could carry him easily
enough through a scolding-match with his mother ; but as
for her life being in danger, that was but an exaggeration
of his feelings by which Hamlet endeavored to deceive
himself: he could strut and bellow bravely before an
erring woman, and so he endeavored to screw his courage
to the sticking- point and prepare himself for the bloody
work which fate had ordained for him How well he
succeeded is shown by the fact that immediately after the
utterance of these words — in fact, almost before they have

7G THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

died upon his lips — destiny gives him the opportunity for
which he has endeavored to persuade himself that he has
been seeking, and again his courage fails him, and he
turns his back upon it, with another brave speech by
which again he tries to excuse himself to his own heart.

There is noticeable in Hamlet a quickness of apprecia-
tion of difference of sex, that would indicate that the
subject was one upon which his mind was often fixed.
When, for instance, he remarks, —

"And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man
delights not me," —

observing that Rosencrantz laughs, he instantly adds, —

" No, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling you
seem to say so.'"'

Again, in his dialogue with the grave-digger, when he
asks, —

" What man dost thou dig it for?" —

and receives the reply, —

i i For no man, sir," —
he immediately questions, —

" What woman then ?"

When Hamlet, seeing the skull thrown from the grave
'' knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's spade," ex-
claims, " Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but
to play at loggats with 'em ? mine ache to think on't,"
/this instinctive thought of the cost of pain, anxiety, and

ADDITIONAL FEMININE TRAITS. 77

danger by which they came into being, seems thoroughly
feminine.

Hamlet's bodily characteristics seem to be as feminine
as his mind. He was small and delicate, for he can think
of no greater contrast than that between Hercules and
himself, and yet was at least moderately plump, for during
his fencing-match the queen says, —

" He's fat and scant of breath. —
Here, Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brows.''

He has a woman's daintiness and sensitiveness to the
weather and to perfumes. When he appears upon the
platform, to wait for the appearance of the ghost, his first
words are, —

il The air bites shrewdly ; it is very cold."

Again, in his conversation with Osric he speaks of the
weather, and blows hot and cold with the same breath.
When handling Yorick's skull, which had lain in the earth
three-and-twenty years, he asks, —

"Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i' the
earth?"

and receives the reply, " E'en so," he adds, " And smelt
so? puh !" and throws down the skull.

In the first quarto, when Osric approaches with the
salutation, —

" Now God saue thee, sweete Prince Hamlet!"
the latter replies, —

11 And vou sir : fob, how the muske-cod smels !"

78 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

And when Osric says, —

" I shall deliuer your most sweet answer,'

Hamlet answers, —

" You may sir, none better, for y'are spiced.
Else he had a bad nose could not smell a fooled

( Hamlet, too, is hysterical. Edward 11. Russell, in an
essay upon Irving as Hamlet, says, —

" Irving has noticed that Hamlet is not merely simple-
minded, frankly susceptible, and naturally self-contem-
plative, but has a trick — not at all uncommon in persons
whose most real life is an inner one — of fostering and
aggravating his own excitements. This discovery of Irving
is a stroke of high genius, and will identify his Hamlet as
long as the memory of it endures. . . . Does Irving dis-
card the tablets ? By no means. But he makes the use of
them lifelike and probable. His snatching them from his
pocket, and writing on them, is the climax of an outburst
hardly distinguishable from hysteria."

The faintness which attacks the prince, after the revela-
tion of the ghost, is such as might trouble a woman :

" Oh, fie ! hold, hold, my heart ;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up."

So the disguised Julia faints from excess of feeling. So
the masquerading Rosalind, overcome by emotion, faints,
and then tries to excuse herself to Oliver :

u OIL Be of good cheer, youth : — you a man ? — You lack a
man's heart.

ADDITIONAL FEMININE TRAITS. 79

" Ros. I do so, I confess it. Ah, sir, a body would think
this was well counterfeited : I pray you, tell your "brother how
well I counterfeited. — Heigh ho ! —

" Oli. This was not counterfeit ; there is too great testimony
in your complexion, that it was a passion of earnest.

11 Ros. Counterfeit, I assure you.

" Oli. Well then, take a good heart, and counterfeit to be
a man.

uRos. So I do : but, i1 faith, I should have been a woman
by right."

Hamlet's physical strength was no greater than might
be expected of a woman. In the struggle with Laertes in
Ophelia's grave, he was instantly overcome, and could do
no more than gasp, —

" I prithee take thy fingers from my throat."

His one manly accomplishment was the art of fencing :
this requires more skill than strength, and therefore Hamlet
excelled in it ; and yet, with equal skill, superior strength
would give an advantage, and therefore Hamlet falls a
little short of the best, and needs odds in his favor in a
match with Laertes.

CHAPTER IX.

HAMLET'S AGE AND BIRTH— THE TERMS USED IN
ADDRESSING HIM.

HAMLET'S youthful beauty was far greater than is
natural in a man thirty years of age. The impression
constantly left by the references to him is that his ap-
pearance was that of extreme youth. Horatio speaks of
him as " Young Hamlet," and the grave-digger repeats
the phrase. He is a student fresh from the university.

Laertes speaks of his love as u a violet in the youth
of primy nature." Ophelia testifies as to his grace and
beauty, —

" Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown !
The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword ;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers,"

with

" Unmatched form and feature of blown youth."

Nor is Ophelia alone in admiration of Hamlet. Horatio,
at his death, exclaims, —

11 Now cracks a noble heart."

80

HAMLET'S AGE AND BIRTH. 81

Fortinbras testifies, —

" He was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally.''

The king bears witness to

" The great love the general gender bear him ;
Who, dipping all his faults'm their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stona,
Convert his gyves to graces ;"

and upon another occasion states that

" He's loved of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgement, but their eyes."

f

In the first quarto there is nothing to lead one to imagine
that Hamlet is more than a youth, scarcely twenty years
of age, perhaps ; but in the later editions Hamlet's age is
fixed by the remarks of the grave-digger, and by the length
of married life of the mimic king and queen, at thirty
years ; and yet, with this increased age (which was a de-
liberate change of Shakespeare's, as is shown by at least
two other changes in the lengths of time named in the
grave-diggers' scene, and which therefore had a purpose),
Hamlet remains as youthful in appearance as before.

Is not Hamlet's extreme maturity of mind, combined
with his youthfulness of appearance, notwithstanding his
actual age of thirty years, strong proof that here was a
woman masquerading in a manly part? A very plain-
looking woman will pass for a very handsome man, when
suitably attired; and the natural brightness and fresh 11-
of her complexion, combined with absence of beard, will

6

82 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

give her a boyish appearance, making her look far younger
than her real age.

It is noticeable that it is stated that young Hamlet was
born the day that the last King Hamlet overcame Fortin-
bras, — that is to say, upon the day that the news of the
combat reached the court and people. From Horatio's
narration to Marcellu'fe, in the first scene of the drama, it
appears that this combat was a mortal, hand-to-hand
struggle between King Hamlet and Fortinbras, in which
the latter was slain. It is not to be supposed that Hamlet
escaped entirely unscathed from such a contest. The pre-
sumption is reasonable that he was severely injured, and
that it may have taken him long to recover from his
wounds, if indeed he ever did fully recover.

News of the struggle reaches the court : Fortinbras is
.slain, Hamlet wounded ; probably at first only half-reliable
rumors are received, crowding fast upon one another,
and so contradictory as to make the actual result of the
combat uncertain. In the midst of the excitement and
confusion the trial of the young queen comes upon her.
A. son had been anxiously expected. The queen knows
that the successor to the throne is chosen by election of
the nobles, and that no daughter could hope to inherit
the crown.

* Now, alone, with her husband seriously, possibly mor-
tally, injured, — with perhaps some reason for thinking that
no other child would ever be born to them (and none other
ever was), — the queen gives birth to their child. If it
should prove to be a daughter, the disappointment would
be great. Is it conceivable that, if the expected child was
found to be a girl, the queen, with the aid of one or two

HAMLETS AGE AND BIRTH. 83

faithful attendants, who had died before our drama opens,
could have acted upon a sudden determination and suc-
ceeded in passing the child off as a son ? X

This step once hastily taken could not be recalled. If
it were taken, then the unhappy child must be brought up
as a boy and trained to play, as well as in her lay the power,
the part of the expected son whom she had replaced.
There could be no retreat, no change : the part once taken
must be played through to the end.

The queen's moral nature was not above this deception :
that is evident from her after-career. Hamlet himself
seems to have inherited much of her fondness for dis- v
simulation, combined with much of his nobler father's ^
disposition .

If a girl were thus educated, and if she should then be
placed in the position in which we find Hamlet, is not the
action of Hamlet such as we might expect from a noble ^
woman thus unhappily situated ?

If this wild imagination were true, could ever human
being be more unhappily placed or deserve a deeper sym-
pathy than the unfortunate Hamlet ?

Let it be observed that the spirit of Hamlet's father^
never calls him " son" : that word is carefully avoided,
although it is doubtful whether another appeal of half the
length, by a father to his son, can be found, in which the
word is not used. What more natural appeal for the per-
turbed spirit than the yearning cry, " My son" ? but it'
never comes.

In " Fratricide Punished," which we imagine to be an
adaptation of the tragedy in one of its earliest forms, be-
fore the character had grown in Shakespeare's mind to be

84 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

\

anything like that of our Hamlet, the ghost says, " Then
hear, my son Hamlet, what I have to tell thee of thy
father's unnatural death."

Is it accidental that the term is omitted in our later
forms and that the ghost addresses him only as " Hamlet"
and " thou noble youth" ?

This is all the more remarkable from contrast with the
speech of the usurper, who seldom addresses Hamlet with-
out using that term ; and at each repetition of the word
Hamlet winces as if a festering sore had been rudely
touched. The first words that Hamlet speaks upon the
stage are in answer to the king's address :

" And now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son;''
at which Hamlet says, aside, —

" A little more than kin, and less than kind."

This " kind" should be read with a short vowel, as the
German word for " child." It should be remembered that
Hamlet had but recently returned from Wittenberg, and
that the use of German words would be natural for him.
Here the expression is a protest against the name of " son"
which the king bestows upon him. He is a little more
than kin, for he is Claudius's nephew and also the son of
his wife, but he is less than his " kind" or child.

Additional proof that the word " kind" is used in its
German sense of "child" is found in the use of another
German word, " crants" (the German " kranz," the Danish
" krands"), with the meaning " wreath," in the words of
the priest at Ophelia's grave :

HAMLET'S AGE AND BIRTH. 85

" Yet here she is allow'd her virgin crants,
Her maiden strewments and the bringing home
Of bell and burial."

Another protest against being called the son of Claudius
is seen in the continuation of the conversation between
the king and Hamlet above referred to. The king pro-
ceeds,—

" How is it that the clouds still hang on you?"
and Hamlet answers, —

" Not so, my lord ; I am too much i' the sun."

Neither of these passages occurs in the first quarto : they
were after-thoughts of the poet.

This wincing at the claimed relationship is shown by
Hamlet's retaliation when he bids farewell to the king,
upon his departure for England, with the words, " Fare-
well, dear mother." The unhappy prince finds an excuse
for the phrase, but its real meaning is, "I am as near
right in calling you ' mother' as you are in calling me
1 son.' "

In this connection it is proper to notice the main objec-
tions that may be urged against the theory that we have
presented.

Hamlet speaks of himself as a son in the following
passages :

11 This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murder 'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must . . . fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion !"

86 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

11 That would be scann'd :
A villain kills my father ; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven."

" Do you not come your tard}T son to chide,
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by
The important acting of. your dread command ?

Oh, say!"

In all these passages it is plain that Hamlet speaks of
himself as he would appear to others. In the first lie
chides himself for acting like a woman ; the second com-
mences, " That would be scanned," indicating clearly the
intention to look at his case from an external stand-point ;
and as to the third instance it may be said that he had
become so accustomed to outwardly playing a son's part
that the word would unconsciously spring to his lips. In
two other cases he speaks of himself to others as a son,
but could hardly do otherwise, even were there no ques-
tion as to the truth of the views herein advanced :

11 O wonderful son, that can so astonish a mother !"

" Besides, to be demanded of a sponge, what replication
should be made by the son of a king?"

Twice the queen addresses Hamlet as a son :

il O gentle son,

Upon the heat and name of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience."

" 0, my son, what theme?"
and the constant habit of considering Hamlet as a son.

HAMLET'S AGE AND BIRTH. 87

and so addressing him before others, may well account
for these. Once more, in speaking to Gruildenstern and
Rosencrantz, she says, —

u And I beseech you instantly to visit
My too much changed son,'7 —

and this is all. When Polonius announces his supposed
discovery that Hamlet's madness is caused by his love for
Ophelia, the queen answers, —

" It may be, very likely."
Addressing Ophelia, the queen says, —

" For your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauty be the happy cause
Of Hamlet's wildness ;"

and at her grave she says, —

11 1 hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife ;
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid."

But, if the queen had been for thirty years endeavoring
to conceal the truth, it is not strange that she should
speak of Hamlet in this manner before others. It is
noticeable that when alone with Hamlet she never refers
to Ophelia, — no, not even when the death of Polonius
would naturally lead to the question as to its effect upon
her son's relations with Polonius's daughter. One further
objection may be noted in the text:

" Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain ? breaks my pate across ?

88 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

' Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face ?

Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat
As deep as to the lungs ? "Who does me this ?"

This reference to plucking off the beard may be consid-
ered as a proverbial expression rather than as an indica-
tion that Hamlet wore a beard. For some reason, all
actors have played the part of our hero with a smooth
and beardless face, and have not found so playing it in-
consistent with the words above quoted. May not this be
a tradition of the stage, coming down unbrokenly from
the time of Shakespeare to the present day, and is not
this beardless face one of the reasons for the youthful
appearance of Hamlet, notwithstanding his thirty years ?

CHAPTEE X.

HAMLET'S HINTS OF FEMININITY— COMPARISON
BETWEEN DIFFERENT EDITIONS.

IN instances in which Shakespeare's heroines are dis-
guised, they frequently slyly allude to their femininity, or
drop little remarks from which clear-sighted acuteness
might infer it ; and there are some of Hamlet's sayings
which may pass for allusions of this kind. Several of
these half-hints have already been noticed, and the follow-
ing are worthy of attention. Hamlet's half-soliloquy be-
fore Horatio, while they are watching for his father's spirit,
seems of this nature :

11 So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As, in their birth, — wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin, —
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit, that too much o'er-leavens
The form of plausive manners ; that these men, —
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature's livery, or fortune's star, —
Their virtues else, — be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo —
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault ; the dram of e'il

-89

90 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

Doth all the noble substance often dout,
To his own scandal."

And his assertion to Horatio, a few moments later, —

" There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy ;" —

is possibly but a continuance of the same brooding over
the mysterious natural fault in himself of which he first
complained. His protest to his mother, —

" These indeed ' seem,'
For they are actions that a man might play ;"

may possibly be an allusion of the same kind. His letter
to Ophelia ends with the following remarkable clause :

''Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to
him, HAMLET."

That is to say, I am your faithful lover as long as my
body is known as Hamlet, but if the time comes when it
is found that that name is inappropriate for me and that
I have no right to bear it, then you will see that I am not
and cannot be yours. Just before the fencing-match which
causes his death, he turns to Horatio with the words, —

:< Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart ;
But it is no matter."

And upon Horatio's hasty protest, " Nay, good my lord,"
—he continues, —

f "It is but foolery; but it is such a kind of gaingiving as
I would perhaps trouble a woman."

HAMLET'S HINTS OF FEMININITY. 01

In " Fratricide Punished" there is a somewhat 'similar ,
expression used by the queen : "I doubt much whether
iny heart will be at ease, for I know not what kind of
an approaching misfortune disturbs our spirits." This
womanly foreboding Shakespeare seems, later, to have )
transferred to Hamlet.

But the most remarkable hint is given in Hamlet's dying
words. It is usually expected that there shall be some
depth of meaning, some concentration of the soul's expe-
rience, in the last words that fall feebly from the chilling
lips as the spirit abandons its grasp upon earthly things :
and " last words" are long remembered. In Hamlet's case,
after beseeching Horatio to live to tell his story and relate

" The occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited — "

he adds, —

" The rest is silence.'1

What is it that is doomed to silence ? Horatio has known
all that we know of the events that occur upon the stage
when he is not present : it is only necessary to wait for his
next appearance to see proof that Hamlet in the interim
has told him all. Nothing has been hidden from him.
unless it be some solemn life.-long mystery, that must !»•.»
carried into the grave.

Ah, breaking heart, that even in death must suffer in
silence ! Can it be that the seal of silence shall ever be
removed? Shall human pity ever so and the depths of
woe that engulfed this unhappy life ?

Even in its silence it cries for sympathy. Was its burden

92 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET.

this, — that, being born for love and protection, it was hope-
lessly cut off from all earthly love, all human aid ? — that,
yearning for a noble, vigorous nature upon which to lean,
a nature that might complement its own abundant sweet-
ness and nobility with manly power, it was not only denied
all assistance, but was compelled to stagger under a load of
woes too heavy for even the strongest, and vainly try to
bear a weight too severe for far greater powers ? Who
knows? Possibly even Shakespeare himself never fully
solved the riddle which fate gradually forced upon him as
Hamlet grew beneath his hand.

* That the character grew to be very different from
that which was intended in the beginning, and that the
change was constantly toward the development of the
feminine element and the pruning out of all that was
inconsistent therewith, is placed beyond all reasonable
^ doubt by a comparison of the first and second quartos,
and is still further proved by a comparison of these with
" Fratricide Punished," if it be admitted that the latter
is an adaptation of an earlier stage of Shakespeare's
drama.

It is remarkable that, of the five quotations last given,
only one, " There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio,'' occurs in the first quarto. Other differences
between the two quartos have been already shown, and it
may now be noted, in addition to these, that the following
passages, all bearing upon our theory, are not found in the
earlier form of the play :

" This heavy-headed revel east and west."
" Let not the royal bed of Denmark."

HAMLET'S HINTS OF FEMININITY. 93

" Hold, hold, my heart ;
And you, my sinews."

u O most pernicious woman !"
11 Let her not walk i' the sun."
" Except my life, except my life."
" The pangs of disprized love."

" And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.'

" The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form."

a For what advancement may I hope from thee,
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits ?"

11 Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal'd thee for herself."

" Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee."

" You would pluck out the heart of my mystery."
" That would be scann'd."

* ' Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty."

u Hyperion's curls ; the front of Jove himself; . . .
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To <nve the world assurance of a man."

94 THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET. -

"What I have to do
Will want true color ! tears perchance for blood."

" Good night ; hut go not to mine uncle's bed.
.Assume a virtue, if you have it not."

k' No, in despite of sense and secrecy,
Unpeg the basket on the house's top.
Let the birds fly, and like the famous ape,
To try conclusions, in the basket creep,
And break your own neck down."

" Let it work :

For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard."

" I see a cherub that sees them."

u How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge !"

" How came he dead ? I'll not be juggled with."

" But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me
Into a towering passion."

" He's fat and scant of breath."
" As thou'rt a man."

It may be observed, also, that the second quarto changes
the length of the wedded life of the mimic king and queen
from forty years to thirty, so as to make the time in con-
\ sonance with that of Hamlet's parent's marriage ; that the
length of time for which the clown has been a grave-digger
is also changed to thirty years, having previously been only
twelve years : that Hamlet's letter to Horatio first appears
the second quarto, and that the entrance of Horatio

HAMLET'S HINTS OF FEMININITY. 95

with Ophelia is not shown before the publication of the
first folio.

In the first quarto the ghost says to Hamlet in relation
to his mother, —

" Speake to her Hamlet, for her sex is weake.-'

This is stricken out in the later edition.

The queen also addresses Hamlet with the exclamation,
" How now, boy !" and this too was afterwards changed.

As a final indication of the truth of our theory, may be
noted the fact of Hamlet's death. The criticism has been
made, that the drama would be a more perfect work of art ^
if Hamlet were finally allowed to execute the ghost's behest
in some open and solemn manner, and then, as in the
original story of Hamlet, have so explained his cause as
to lead to universal belief in the truth of his claims, and
to his investment with the crown, closing the drama with
Hamlet left to a happy, prosperous life.

The death of Hamlet may at first have been dictated by
a pandering to the popular bloody-minded taste ; but in
this, as in the reason for delay in fulfilling the ghost's com-
mands, we may conclude that Shakespeare's riper powers
substituted a sufficient reason in the character of the hero.
Hamlet must die, for the " cursed spite" under which he
was born was such that for his woes there could be no
other end than death.

FINIS.

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